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by Julius Wellhausen
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Title: Prolegomena to the History of Israel
Author: Julius Wellhausen
Release Date: December, 2003 [EBook #4732]
[Most recently updated February 17, 2003]
Edition: 11
Language: English
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This etext was produced by Geoffrey Cowling.
P R O L E G O M E N A
to the
HISTORY OF ISRAEL.
WITH A REPRINT OF THE ARTICLE "ISRAEL"
FROM THE "ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA."
by
JULIUS WELLHAUSEN,
PROFESSOR OF ORIENTAL LANGUAGES IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
MARBURG.
TRANSLATED FR0M THE GERMAN, UNDER THE AUTHOR'S SUPERVISION,
by
J. SUTHERLAND BLACK, M.A.,
and
ALLAN MENZIES, B.D.
with a preface by
PROF. W. ROBERTSON SMITH.
P R E F A C E.
The work which forms the greater part of the present volume first
appeared in 1878 under the title "History of Israel. By J.
Wellhausen. In two volumes. Volume I." The book produced a great
impression throughout Europe, and its main thesis, that "the Mosaic
history is not the starting-point for the history of ancient
Israel, but for the history of Judaism," was felt to be so
powerfully maintained that many of the leading Hebrew teachers of
Germany who had till then stood aloof from the so-called "Grafian
hypothesis"--the doctrine, that is, that the Levitical Law and
connected parts of the Pentateuch were not written till after the
fall of the kingdom of Judah, and that the Pentateuch in its
present compass was not publicly accepted as authoritative till
the reformation of Ezra--declared themselves convinced by
Wellhausen's arguments. Before 1878 the Grafian hypothesis was
neglected or treated as a paradox in most German universities,
although some individual scholars of great name were known to have
reached by independent inquiry similar views to those for which
Graf was the recognised sponsor, and although in Holland the
writings of Professor Kuenen, who has been aptly termed Graf's
goel, had shown in an admirable and conclusive manner that the
objections usually taken to Graf's arguments did not touch the
substance of the thesis for which he contended.
Since 1878, partly through the growing influence of Kuenen, but
mainly through the impression produced by Wellhausen's book, all
this has been changed. Almost every younger scholar of mark is on
the side of Vatke and Reuss, Lagarde and Graf, Kuenen and
Wellhausen, and the renewed interest in Old Testament study which
is making itself felt throughout all the schools of Europe must be
traced almost entirely to the stimulus derived from a new view of
the history of the Law which sets all Old Testament problems in a
new light.
Our author, who since 1878 had been largely engaged in the study
of other parts of Semitic antiquity, has not yet given to the world
his promised second volume. But the first volume was a complete
book in itself; the plan was to reserve the whole narrative of the
history of Israel for vol.ii., so that vol.i. was entirely
occupied in laying the critical foundations on which alone a real
history of the Hebrew nation could be built. Accordingly, the
second edition of the History, vol.i., appeared in 1883 (Berlin,
Reimer), under the new title of "Prolegomena to the History of
Israel." In this form it is professedly, as it really was before,
a complete and self-contained work; and this is the form of which
a translation, carefully revised by the author, is now offered to
the public.
All English readers interested in the Old Testament will certainly
be grateful to the translators and publishers for a volume which in
its German garb has already produced so profound an impression on
the scholarship of Europe; and even in this country the author's
name is too well known to make it necessary to introduce him at
length to a new public. But the title of the book has a somewhat
unfamiliar sound to English ears, and may be apt to suggest a
series of dry and learned dissertations meant only for Hebrew
scholars. It is worth while therefore to point out in a few words
that this would be quite a false impression; that the matters with
which Professor Wellhausen deals are such as no intelligent student
of the Old Testament can afford to neglect; and that the present
volume gives the English reader, for the first time, an
opportunity to form his own judgment on questions which are within
the scope of any one who reads the English Bible carefully and is
able to think clearly, and without prejudice, about its contents.
The history of Israel is part of the history of the faith by
which we live, the New Testament cannot be rightly understood
without understanding the Old, and the main reason why so many
parts of the Old Testament are practically a sealed book even to
thoughtful people is simply that they have not the historical key
to the interpretation of that wonderful literature.
The Old Testament does not furnish a history of Israel, though it
supplies the materials from which such a history can be
constructed. For example, the narrative of Kings gives but the
merest outline of the events that preceded the fall of Samaria; to
understand the inner history of thc time we must fill up this
outline with the aid of the prophets Amos and Hosea. But the more
the Old Testament has been studied, the more plain has it become
that for many parts of the history something more is needed than
merely to read each part of the narrative books in connection with
the other books that illustrate the same period. The Historical
Books and the Pentateuch are themselves very composite structures,
in which old narratives occur imbedded in later compilations, and
groups of old laws are overlaid by ordinances of comparatively
recent date. Now, to take one point only, but that the most
important, it must plainly make a vast difference to our whole
view of the providential course of Israel's history if it appear
that instead of the whole Pentateuchal law having been given to
Israel before the tribes crossed the Jordan, that law really grew
up little by little from its Mosaic germ, and did not attain its
present form till the Israelites were the captives or the subjects
of a foreign power. This is what the new school of Pentateuch
criticism undertakes to prove, and it does so in a way that should
interest every one. For in the course of the argument it appears
that the plain natural sense of the old history has constantly
been distorted by the false presuppositions with which we have
been accustomed to approach it--that having a false idea of the
legal and religious culture of the Hebrews when they first entered
Canaan, we continually miss the point of the most interesting
parts of the subsequent story, and above all fail to understand the
great work accomplished by the prophets in destroying Old Israel
and preparing the way first for Judaism and then for the Gospel.
These surely are inquiries which no conscientious student of the
Bible can afford to ignore.
The process of disentangling the twisted skein of tradition is
necessarily a very delicate and complicated one, and involves
certain operations for which special scholarship is indispensable.
Historical criticism is a comparatively modern science, and in its
application to this, as to other histories, it has made many false
and uncertain steps. But in this, as in other sciences, when the
truth has been reached it can generally be presented in a
comparatively simple form, and the main positions can be justified
even to the general reader by methods much less complicated, and
much more lucid, than those originally followed by the
investigators themselves. The modern view as to the age of the
Pentateuchal law, which is the key to the right understanding of
the History of Israel, has been reached by a mass of
investigations and discussions of which no satisfactory general
account has ever been laid before the English reader. Indeed, even
on the Continent, where the subject has been much more studied than
among us, Professor Wellhausen's book was the first complete and
sustained argument which took up the question in all its
historical bearings.
More recently Professor Kuenen of Leyden, whose discussions of
the more complicated questions of Pentateuch analysis are perhaps
the finest things that modern criticism can show, has brought out
the second edition of the first volume of his Onderzoek, and when
this appears in English, as it is soon to do, our Hebrew students
will have in their hands an admirable manual of what I may call
the anatomy of the Pentateuch, in which they can follow from
chapter to chapter the process by which the Pentateuch grew to its
present form. But for the mass of Bible-readers such detailed
analysis will always be too difficult. What every one can
understand and ought to try to master, is the broad historical
aspect of the matter. And this the present volume sets forth in a
way that must be full of interest to every one who has tasted the
intense pleasure of following institutions and ideas in their
growth, and who has faith enough to see the hand of God as clearly
in a long providential development as in a sudden miracle.
The reader will find that every part of the "Prolegomena" is
instinct with historical interest, and contributes something to a
vivid realisation of what Old Israel really was, and why it has
so great a part in the history of spiritual faith. In the first
essay of the Prolegomena a complete picture is given of the
history of the ordinances of worship in Israel, and the
sacrifices, the feasts, the priesthood, are all set in a fresh
light. The second essay, the history of what the Israelites
themselves believed and recorded about their past, will perhaps to
some readers seem less inviting, and may perhaps best be read
after perusal of the article, reprinted from the "Encyclopaedia
Britannica", which stands at the close of the volume and affords a
general view of the course of the history of Israel, as our author
constructs it on the basis of the researches in his Prolegomena.
The essay on Israel and Judaism with which the Prolegomena close,
may in like manner be profitably compared with sect. II of the
appended sketch--a section which is not taken directly from the
"Encyclopaedia", but translated from the German edition of the
article "Israel", where the subject is expanded by the author.
Here the reader will learn how close are the bonds that connect
the critical study of the Old Testament with the deepest and
unchanging problems of living faith.
W. ROBERTSON SMITH.
TRANSLATORS' NOTE.
Pages 237 [chapter IV . 3] to 425 [end] of the "Prolegomena"
and section II of "Israel" are translated by Mr. Menzies;
for the rest of the volume Mr. Black is responsible.
Both desire to express their indebtedness to Professor Robertson Smith
for many valuable suggestions made as the sheets were passing
through the press.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PROLEGOMENA.
INTRODUCTION--
1. Is the Law the starting-point for the history of ancient
Israel or for that of Judaism ? The latter possibility
is not precluded a priori by the history of the Canon. Reasons
for considering it. De Wette, George, Vatke, Reuss, Graf
2. The three strata of the Pentateuch: Deuteronomy, Priestly
Code, Jehovist
3. The question is as to the Priestly Code and its historical
position. Method of the investigation
A. HISTORY OF WORSHIP.
CHAPTER I. THE PLACE OF WORSHIP--
I.I.1. The historical and prophetical books show no trace in Hebrew
antiquity of a sanctuary of exclusive legitimacy
I.I.2. Polemic of the prophets against the sanctuaries.
Fall of Samaria. Reformation of Josiah
I.I.3. Influence of the Babylonian exile
I.II.1. The Jehovist (JE) sanctions a multiplicity of altars
I.II.2. Deuteronomy (D) demands local unity of worship
I.II.3. The Priestly Code (RQ) presupposes that unity, and transfers
it, by means of the Tabernacle, to primitive times
I.III.1. The tabernacle, as a central sanctuary and dwelling
for the ark, can nowhere be found in the historical tradition
I.III.2. Noldeke's view untenable
CHAPTER II. SACRIFICE--
II.I.1. The ritual is according to RQ the main subject of the Mosaic
legislation, according to JE it is pre-Mosaic usage;
in RQ the point is How, according to JE and D To Whom,
it is offered
II.I.2. The historical books agree with JE; the prophets down to
Ezekiel contradict RQ
II.II.1. Material innovations in RQ. Preliminary remarks on the
notion, contents, mode of offering, and propitiatory effects of
sacrifice.
II.II.2. Material and ideal refinement of the offerings in RQ
II.II.3. The sacrificial meal gives way to holocausts
II.II.4. Development of the trespass-offering.
II.III.1. The centralisation of worship at Jerusalem destroyed
the connection of sacrifice with the natural occasions of life,
so that it lost its original character
CHAPTER III. THE SACRED FEASTS--
III.I.1. In JE and D there is a rotation of three festivals. Easter
and Pentecost mark the beginning and the end of the corn-harvest,
and the autumn feast the vintage and the bringing home the corn
from the threshing-floor. With the feast of unleavened bread
(Massoth) is conjoined, especially in D, the feast of the
sacrifice of the male firstborn of cattle (Pesah).
III.I.2. The feasts based on the offering of firstlings of the field and
of the herd. Significance of the land and of agriculture for religion
III.II.1. In the historical and prophetical books, the autumn feast
only is distinctly attested, and it is the most important in JE
and D also: of the others there are only faint traces .
III.II.2. But the nature of the festivals is the same as in JE and D
III.III.1. In RQ the feasts have lost their reference to harvest
and the first fruits; and this essentially changes their
nature
III.III.2. The metamorphosis was due to the centralisation of worship,
and may he traced down through Deuteronomy and Ezekiel to RQ,
III.III.3. To the three festivals RQ adds the great day of atonement,
which arose out of the fast-days of the exile
III.IV.1. The Sabbath, which is connected with the new moon, was
originally a lunar festival
Exaggeration of the Sabbath rest in the Priestly Code
III.IV.2. Sabbatical year, and year of Jubilee
CHAP. IV. THE PRIESTS AND THE LEVITES--
IV.I.1. According to Ezek. xliv., only the Levites of Jerusalem,
the sons of Zadok, are to continue priests in the new
Jerusalem; the other Levites are to be degraded to their servants
and denuded of their priestly rights. According to RQ
the Levites never possessed the priestly right, but only
the sons of Aaron
IV.I.2. These answer to the sons of Zadok
IV.II.1. In the earliest period of the history of Israel there is no
distinction between clergy and laity. Every one may
slaughter and sacrifice; there are professional priests only at the
great sanctuaries. Priestly families at Sihiloh and Dan.
No setting apart of what is holy
IV.II.2. Royal temples of the kings; priests at them as royal officials
IV.II.3. Importance of the North-Israelite priesthood in the time of the
kings
IV.II.4. The family of Zadok at Jerusalem
IV.III.1. In the oldest part of JE there are no priests; no Aaron
by the side of Moses
IV.III.2. In D the Levites are priests. They occur in that character,
not to speak of Judges xviii. seq., only in the literature
of the exile. Their descent from Moses or Aaron. The spiritual
and the secular tribe of Levi. Difficulty of bringing them together
IV.III.3. Consolidation of the spiritual tribe in RQ; separation of
priests and Levites. Further development of the clergy after the
exile. The high priest as head of the theocracy
CHAPTER V. THE ENDOWMENT OF THE CLERGY--
V.I.1. The sacrificial dues raised in RQ
V.I.2. The firstlings were turned into contributions to the priests,
and doubled in amount
V.II.1. Levitical towns
V.II.2. The historical situation underlying the priestly pretensions
in RQ
B. HISTORY OF TRADITION.
CHAPTER VI. CHRONICLES--
VI.I.1. David becomes Saul's successor without any exertion, all
Israel being already on his side, namely, the priests and Levites
Distortion of the original story of the bringing of the ark
to Jerusalem. Omission of unedifying incidents in David's life
VI.I.2. Preparation for the building of the temple. Delight of the
narrator in numbers and names. Inconsistency with 1Kings i, ii.
Picture of David in Chronicles
VI.I.3. Solomon's sacrifice at the tabernacle at Gibeah. Building
of the temple. Retouching of the original narrative
VI.II.1. Estimate of the relation between Judah and Israel; the
Israelites do not belong to the temple, nor, consequently,
to the theocracy
VI.II.2. Levitical idealising of Judah. View taken of those acts of
rulers in the temple-worship which the books of Kings condemn or
approve. Inconsistencies with the narrative of the sources;
importation of priests and Levites.
VI.II.3. Divine pragmatism of the sacred history, and its results
VI.II.4. The books of Kings obviously present throughout
VI.III.1. The genealogical registers of I Chron.i-ix The ten tribes
VI.III.2. Judah and Levi
VI.III.3. Chronicles had no other sources for the period before the exile
than the historical books preserved to us in the Canon.
The diversity of historical view is due to the influence of the law,
especially the Priestly Code. The Midrash
CHAPTER VII. JUDGES, SAMUEL, AND KINGS--
VII.I.1. The formula on which the book of Judges is constructed
in point of chronology and of religion
VII.I.2. Its relation to the stem of the tradition. Judg. xix.-xxi.
VI.II.3. Occasional additions to the original narratives
VII.I.4. Difference of religious attitude in the latter
VII.II.1. Chronological and religious formulas in the books of Samuel
VII.II.2. The stories of the rise of the monarchy and the elevation
of Saul entirely recast
VII.II.3. Saul's relation to Samuel
VII.II.4. The narrative of David's youth
The view taken of Samuel may be regarded as a measure of the growth
of the tradition Saul and David
VII.III.1. The last religious chronological revision of the books of
Kings. Similar in kind to that of Judges and Samuel
Its standpoint Judaean and Deuteronomistic
VII.III.2. Its relation to the materials received from tradition
VII.III.3. Differences of sentiment in the sources
VII.III.4. In Chronicles the history of ancient Israel is recast
in accordance with the ideas of the Priestly Code; in the
older historical books it is judged according to the standard of
Deuteronomy
CHAPTER VIII. THE NARRATIVE OF THE HEXATEUCH--
VIII.I.1. Genesis i. and Genesis ii. iii.
VIII.I.2. Genesis iv.-xi.
VIII.I.3. The primitive world-history in JE and in Q
VIII.II.1. The history of the patriarchs in JE
VIII.II.2. The history of the patriarchs in Q
VIII.II.3. Periods, numbers, covenants, sacrifices in the patriarchal
age in Q
VIII.III.1. The Mosaic history in JE and in Q
VII.III.2. Comparison of the various narratives
VII.III.3. Conclusion .
C. ISRAEL AND JUDAISM.
CHAPTER IX. CONCLUSION OF THE CRITICISM OF THE LAW--
IX.I.1. The veto of critical analysis
IX.I.2. The historical presuppositions of Deuteronomy
IX.I.3. The Deuteronomistic revision does not extend over the Priestly
Code
IX.II.1. The final revision of the Hexateuch proceeds from the
Priestly Code, as we see from Leviticus xvii. seq.
IX.II.2. Examination of Leviticus xxvi.
IX.II.3. R cannnot be separated from RQ
IX.III<.1.> The language of the Priestly Code
CHAPTER X. THE ORAL AND THE WRITTEN TORAH--
X.I.1. No written law in ancient Israel. The Decalogue
X.I.2. The Torah of Jehovah in the mouth of priests and prophets
X.I.3. View of revelation in Jeremiah, Zechariah, and the writer
of Isa. xl.-lxvi.
X.II.1. Deuteronomy was the first law in our sense of the word.
It obtains authority during the exile. End of prophecy
X.II.2. The reforming legislation supplemented by that of the
restoration. The usages of worship codified and systematised by
Ezekiel and his successors. The Priestly Code--its introduction
by Ezra
X.II.3. The Torah the basis of the Canon. Extension of the notion
originally attached to the Torah to the other books
CHAPTER XI. THE THEOCRACY AS IDEA AND AS INSTITUTION--
XI.I.1. Freshness and naturalness of early Israelite history
XI.I.2. Rise of the state. Relation of Religion and of the Deity
to the life of state and nation.
XI.I.3. The Messianic theocracy of the older prophets is built
up on the foundations afforded by the actual community
of their time
XI.I.4. The idea of the covenant
XI.II.1. Foundation of the theocratic constitution under the foreign
domination
XI.II.2. The law and the prophets.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
I S R A E L.
1. The beginnings of the nation
2. The settlement in Palestine.
3. The foundation of the kingdom, and the first three kings
4. From Jeroboam I. to Jeroboam II.
5. God, the world, and the life of men in Old Israel
6. The fall of Samaria
7. The deliverance of Judah
8. The prophetic reformation .
9. Jeremiah and the destruction of Jerusalem .
10. The captivity and the restoration
11. Judaism and Christianity
12. The Hellenistic period
13. The Hasmonaeans
14. Herod and the Romans
15. The Rabbins
16. The Jewish Dispersion
INTRODUCTION.
In the following pages it is proposed to discuss the place in
history of the "law of Moses;" more precisely, the question to be
considered is whether that law is the starting-point for the
history of ancient Israel, or not rather for that of Judaism, ie.,
of the religious communion which survived the destruction of the
nation by the Assyrians and Chaldaeans.
I. It is an opinion very extensively held that the great mass of
the books of the Old Testament not only relate to the pre-exilic
period, but date from it. According to this view, they are
remnants of the literature of ancient Israel which the Jews rescued
as a heritage from the past, and on which they continued to
subsist in the decay of independent intellectual life. In
dogmatic theology Judaism is a mere empty chasm over which one
springs from the Old Testament to the New; and even where this
estimate is modified, the belief still prevails in a general way
that the Judaism which received the books of Scripture into the
canon had, as a rule, nothing to do with their production. But the
exceptions to this principle which are conceded as regards the
second and third divisions of the Hebrew canon cannot be called so
very slight. Of the Hagiograpba, by far the larger portion is
demonstrably post-exilic, and no part demonstrably older than
the exile. Daniel comes as far down as the Maccabaean wars, and
Esther is perhaps even later. Of the prophetical literature a very
appreciable fraction is later than the fall of the Hebrew kingdom;
and the associated historical books (the "earlier prophets" of the
Hebrew canon) date, in the form in which we now possess them, from
a period subsequent to the death of Jeconiah, who must have
survived the year 560 B.C. for some time. Making all allowance
for the older sources utilised, and to a large extent transcribed
word for word, in Judges, Samuel, and Kings, we find that apart
from the Pentateuch the preexilic portion of the Old Testament
amounts in bulk to little more than the half of the entire volume.
All the rest belongs to the later period, and it includes not
merely the feeble after-growths of a failing vegetation, but also
productions of the vigour and originality of Isa. xl.lxvi. and
Ps.Ixxiii.
We come then to the Law. Here, as for most parts of the Old
Testament, we have no express information as to the author and date
of composition, and to get even approximately at the truth we are
shut up to the use of such data as can be derived from an analysis
of the contents, taken in conjunction with what we may happen to
know from other sources as to the course of Israel's history. But
the habit has been to assume that the historical period to be
considered in this connection ends with the Babylonian exile as
certainly as it begins with the exodus from Egypt. At first sight
this assumption seems to be justified by the history of the
canon; it was the Law that first became canonical through the
influence of Ezra and Nehemiah; the Prophets became so
considerably later, and the Hagiographa last of all. Now it is
not unnatural, from the chronological order in which these writings
were received into the canon, to proceed to an inference as to
their approximate relative age, and so not only to place the
Prophets before the Hagiographa, but also the five books of Moses
before the Prophets. If the Prophets are for the most part older
than the exile, how much more so the Law! But however trustworthy
such a mode of comparison may be when applied to the middle as
contrasted with the latest portion of the canon, it is not at all
to be relied on when the first part is contrasted with the other
two. The very idea of canonicity was originally associated with
the Torah, and was only afterwards extended to the other books,
which slowly and by a gradual process acquired a certain measure
of the validity given to the Torah by a single public and formal
act, through which it was introduced at once as the Magna Charta of
the Jewish communion (Nehemiah viii.-x.) In their case the canonical--
that is, legal--character was not intrinsic, but was only
subsequently acquired; there must therefore have been some
interval, and there may have been a very long one, between the
date of their origin and that of their receiving public sanction.
To the Law, on the other hand, the canonical character is much more
essential, and serious difficulties beset the assumption that the
Law of Moses came into existence at a period long before the exile,
aml did not attain the force of law until many centuries
afterwards, and in totally different circumstances from those
under which it had arisen. At least the fact that a collection
claiming public recognition as an ecclesiastical book should have
attained such recognition earlier than other writings which make no
such claim is no proof of superior antiquity.
We cannot, then, peremptorily refuse to regard it as possible
that what was the law of Judaism may also have been its product;
and there are urgent reasons for taking the suggestion into very
careful consideration. It may not be out of place here to refer
to personal experience. In my early student days I was attracted
by the stories of Saul and David, Ahab and Elijah; the discourses
of Amos and Isaiah laid strong hold on me, and I read myself well
into the prophetic and historical books of the Old Testament.
Thanks to such aids as were accessible to me, I even considered
that I understood them tolerably, but at the same time was troubled
with a bad conscience, as if I were beginning with the roof instead
of the foundation; for I had no thorough acquaintance with the
Law, of which I was accustomed to be told that it was the basis and
postulate of the whole literature. At last I took courage and made
my way through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and even through
Knobel's Commentary to these books. But it was in vain that I
looked for the light which was to be shed from this source on the
historical and prophetical books. On the contrary, my enjoyment
of the latter was marred by the Law; it did not bring them any
nearer me, but intruded itself uneasily, like a ghost that makes a
noise indeed, but is not visible and really effects nothing. Even
where there were points of contact between it and them, differences
also made themselves felt, and I found it impossible to give a
candid decision in favour of the priority of the Law. Dimly I
began to perceive that throughout there was between them all the
difference that separates two wholly distinct worlds. Yet, so far
from attaining clear conceptions, I only fell into deeper
confusion, which was worse confounded by the explanations of Ewald
in the second volume of history of Israel. At last, in the course
of a casual visit in Gottingen in the summer of 1867, I learned
through Ritschl that Karl Heinrich Graf placed the law later than
the Prophets, and, almost without knowing his reasons for the
hypothesis, I was prepared to accept it; I readily acknowledged
to myself thc possibility of understanding Hebrew antiquity
without the book of the Torah.
The hypothesis usually associated with Graf's name is really not
his, but-that of his teacher, Eduard Reuss. It would be still
more correct to call it after Leopold Gcorge and Wiihelm Vatke,
who, independent alike of Reuss and of each other, were the first
to give it literary currency. All three, again, are disciples of
Martin Lebrecht de Wette, the epochmaking pioneer of historical
criticism in this field./1/
*******************************
1. M. W. L. de Wette, Beitraege zur Einleitung in das A. T.
(Bd. I. Kritischer Versuch ueber die Glaubwuerdigkeit der Buecher
der Chronik; Bd. II. Kritik der Mosaischen Geschichte, Halle, 1806-07);
J. F. L. George, Die alterer Juedischen Feste mit einer Kritik der
Gesetzgebung des Pentateuch (Berlin, 1835; preface dated 12th
October); W. Vatke, Die biblische Theologie wissenschaftlich
dargestellt (Berlin, 1835; preface dated 18th October;
publication did not get beyond first part of the first volume);
K. H. Graf, Die geschichtlicher Buecher des Alten Testaments
(Leipsic, 1866). That Graf as well as J. Orth (Nouv. Rev. de
Theol., iii. 84 sqq., iv. 350 sqq., Paris, 1859-60) owed the
impulse to his critical labours to his Strassburg master was not
unknown; but how great must have been the share of Reuss in the
hypothesis of Graf has only been revealed in 1879, by the
publication of certain theses which he had formulated as early as
1833, but had hesitated to lay in print before the general
theological public. These are as follows:-- "1. L'element
historique du Pentateuque peut et doit etre examine a part et ne
pas etre confondu avec l'element legal. 2. L'un et l'autre ont pu
exister sans redaction ecrite. La mention, chez d'anciens
ecrivains, de certaines traditions patriarcales ou mosaiques, ne
prouve pas l'existence du Pentateuque, et une nation peut avoir un
droit coutumier sans code ecrit. Les traditions nationales des
Israelites remontent plus haut que les lois du Pentateuque et la
redaction des premieres est anterieure a celle des secondes.
4. L'interet principal de l'historien doit porter sur la date des
lois, parce que sur ce terrain il a plus de chance d'arriver a des
resultats certains. II faut en consequence proceder a
l'interrogatoire des temoins. 5. L'histoire racontee, dans les
livres des Juges et de Samuel, et meme en partie celle comprise
dans les livres des Rois, est en contradiction avec des lois dites
mosaiques; donc celles-ci etaient inconnues a l'epoque de la
redaction de ces livres, a plus forte raison elles n'ont pas existe
dans les temps qui y vent decrits. 6. Les prophetes du 8e et du
7e siecle ne savent rien du code mosaique. 7. Jeremie est le
premier prophete qui connaisse une loi ecrite et ses citations
rapportent au Deuteronome. 8. Le Deuteronome (iv.45-xxviii.68)
est le livre que les pretres pretendaient avoir trouve dans le
temple du temps du roi Josias. Ce code est la partie la plus
ancienne de la legislation (redigee) comprise dans le Pentateuque.
9. L'histoire des Israelites, en tant qu'il s'agit du
developpement national determine par des lois ecrites, se divisera
en deux periodes, avant et apres Josias. 10. Ezechiel est
anterieur a la redaction du code rituel et des lois qui ont
definitivement organise la hierarchie. 11. Le livre du Josue
n'est pas, tant s'en faut, la partie la plus recente de l'ouvrage
entier. 12. Le redacteur du Pentateuque se distingue clairement
de l'ancien prophete Moyse." --L'Histoire Sainte et la Loi, Paris,
1879, pp. 23, 24.
******************************************
He indeed did not himself succeed in reaching a sure position,
but he was the first clearly to perceive and point out how
disconnected are the alleged starting-point of Israel's history
and that history itself. The religious community set up on so
broad a basis in the wilderness, with its sacred centre and uniform
organisation, disappears and leaves no trace as soon as Israel
settles in a land of its own, and becomes, in any proper sense, a
nation. The period of the Judges presents itself to us as a
confused chaos, out of which order and coherence are gradually
evolved under the pressure of external circumstances, but perfectly
naturally and without the faintest reminiscence of a sacred
unifying constitution that had formerly existed. Hebrew antiquity
shows absolutely no tendencies towards a hierocracy; power is
wielded solely by the heads of families and of tribes, and by
the kings, who exercise control over religious worship also, and
appoint and depose its priests. The influence possessed by the
latter is purely moral; the Torah of God is not a document in
their hands which guarantees their own position, but merely an
instruction for others in their mouths; like the word of the
prophets, it has divine authority but not political sanction, and
has validity only in so far as it is voluntarily accepted. And
as for the literature which has come down to us from the period of
the Kings, it would puzzle the very best intentions to beat up so
many as two or three unambiguous allusions to the Law, and these
cannot be held to prove anything when one considers, by way of
contrast, what Homer was to the Greeks.
To complete the marvel, in post-exile Judaism the Mosaism which
until then had been only latent suddenly emerges into prominence
everywhere. We now find the Book regarded as the foundation of all
higher life, and the Jews, to borrow the phrase of the Koran, are
"the people of the Book;" we have the sanctuary with its priests
and Levites occupying the central position, and the people as a
congregation encamped around it; the cultus, with its
burnt-offerings and sin-offerings, its purifications and its
abstinences, its feasts and Sabbaths, strictly observed as
prescribed by the Law, is now the principal business of life.
When we take the community of the second temple and compare it
with the ancient people of Israel, we are at once able to realise
how far removed was thc latter from so-called Mosaism. The Jews
themselves were thoroughly conscious of the distance. The
revision of the books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings, undertaken
towards the end of the Babylonian exile, a revision much more
thorough than is commonly assumed, condemns as heretical the whole
age of the Kings. At a later date, as the past became more
invested with a certain nimbus of sanctity, men preferred to clothe
it with the characters of legitimacy rather than sit in judgment
upon it. The Book of Chronicles shows in what manner it was
necessary to deal with the history of bygone times when it was
assumed that the Mosaic hierocracy was their fundamental
institution.
2. The foregoing remarks are designed merely to make it plain
that the problem we have set before us is not an imaginary one,
but actual and urgent. They are intended to introduce it; but to
solve it is by no means so easy. The question what is the
historical place of the Law does not even admit of being put in
these simple terms. For the Law, If by that word we understand
the entire Pentateuch, is no literary unity, and no simple
historical quantity./1/
*************************
1. Compare the article "Pentateuch" in the Ninth edition
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. xviii.
*************************
Since the days of Peyrerius and Spinoza, criticism has acknowledged
the complex character of that remarkable literary production,
and from Jean Astruc onwards has laboured, not without success,
at disentangling its original elements. At present there are
a number of results that can be regarded as settled. The following
are some of them. The five Books of Moses and the Book of Joshua
constitute one whole, the conquest of the Promised Land rather than
the death of Moses forming the true conclusion of the patriarchal
history, the exodus, and the wandering in the wilderness.
From a literary point of view, accordingly, it is more accurate
to speak of the Hexateuch than of the Pentateuch. Out of this whole,
the Book of Deuteronomy, as essentially an independent law-book,
admits of being separated most easily. Of what remains,
the parts most easily distinguished belong to the so-called
"main stock" ("Grundschrift"), formerly also called the Elohistic
document, on account of the use it makes of the divine name Elohim
up to the time of Moses, and designated by Ewald, with reference
to the regularly recurring superscriptions in Genesis, as the Book of
Origins. It is distinguished by its liking for number, and
measure, and formula generally, by its stiff pedantic style, by
its constant use of certain phrases and turns of expression which
do not occur elsewhere in the older Hebrew; its characteristics
are more strongly marked than those of any of the others, and
make it accordingly the easiest to recognise with certainty. Its
basis is the Book of Leviticus and thc allied portions of the
adjoining books,-- Exodus xxv.-xl., with the exception of chaps.
xxxii.-xxxiv., and Num.i.-x., xv.-xix., xxv.-xxxvi., with trifling
exceptions. It thus contains legislation chiefly, and, in point of
fact, relates substantially to the worship of the tabernacle and
cognate matters. It is historical only in form; the history
serves merely as a framework on which to arrange thc legislative
material, or as a mask to disguise it. For the most part, the
thread of the narrative is extremely thin, and often serves
merely to carry out the chronology, which is kept up without a
hiatus from the Creation to the Exodus; it becomes fuller only on
the occasions in which other interests come into play, as, for
example, in Genesis, with regard to the three preludes to the
Mosaic covenant which are connected with the names of Adam, Noah,
and Abraham respectively. When this fundamental document is also
separated out as well as Deuteronomy, there remains the Jehovistic
history-book, which, in contrast with the two others, is
essentially of a narrative character, and sets forth with full
sympathy and enjoyment the materials handed down by tradition.
The story of the patriarchs, which belongs to this document almost
entirely, is what best marks its character; that story is not
here dealt with merely as a summary introduction to something of
greater importance which is to follow, but as a subject of primary
importance, deserving the fullest treatment possible. Legislative
elements have been taken into it only at one point, where they
fit into the historical connection, namely, when the giving of the
Law at Sinai is spoken of (Exodusxx.-xxiii., xxxiv.)
Scholars long rested satisfied with this twofold division of the
non-Deuteronomic Hexateuch, until Hupfeld demonstrated in certain
parts of Genesis, which until then had been assigned partly to the
"main stock" and partly to the Jehovist, the existence of a third
continuous source, the work of the so-called younger Elohist. The
choice of this name was due to the circumstance that in this
document also Elohim is the ordinary name of the Deity, as it is
in the "main stock" up to Exodus vi.; the epithet "younger,"
however, is better left out, as it involves an unproved assumption,
and besides, is no longer required for distinction's sake, now that
the "main stock" is no longer referred to under so unsuitable a
name as that of Elohist. Hupfeld further assumed that all the
three sources continued to exist separately until some one at a
later date brought them together simultaneously into a single
whole. But this is a view that cannot be maintained: not merely
is the Elohist in his matter and in his manner of looking at things
most closely akin to the Jehovist; his document has come down to
us as Noldeke was thc first to perceive, only in extracts embodied
in the Jehovist narrative./1/
***************************
Hermann Hupfeld, Die Quellen der Genesis u. die Art ihrer Zusammersetzung,
Berlin, 1853; Theodor Noldeke, Die s. g. Grundschrift des Pentateuch,
in Untersuchungen zur Kritik des Alten Testaments, Kiel, 1869.
***************************
Thus, notwithstanding Hupfeld's discovery, the old division
into two great sections continues to hold good, and there is every
reason for adhering to this primary distinction as the basis of
further historical research, in spite of the fact, which is coming
to be more and more clearly perceived, that not only the
Jehovistic document, but the "main stock" as well, are complex
products, and that alongside of them occur hybrid or posthumous
elements which do not admit of being simply referred to either the
one or the other formation. /2/
************************
2. J. Wellhausen, Die Composition des Hexateuchs, in Jahrb. f.
Deutsche Theologie, 1876, pp. 392-450, 531-602; 1877, pp. 407-479.
I do not insist on all the details, but, as regards the way in which
the literary process which resulted in the formation of the Pentateuch
is to be looked at in general, I believe I had indicated the proper
line of investigation. Hitherto the only important corrections
I have received have been those of Kuenen in his Contributions
to the Criticism of the Pentateuch and Joshua, published in the Leyden
Theologisch Tijdschrift; but these are altogether welcome,
inasmuch as they only free my own fundamental view from some
relics of the old leaven of a mechanical separation of sources
which had continued to adhere to it. For what Kuenen points out
is, that certain elements assigned by me to the Elohist are not
fragments of a once independent whole, but interpolated and
parasitic additions. What effect this demonstration may have on
the judgment we form of the Elohist himself is as yet uncertain.
In the following pages the Jehovistic history-book is denoted by
the symbol JE, its Jehovistic part by J, and the Elohistic by E;
the "main stock" pure and simple, which is distinguished by its
systematising history and is seen unalloyed in Genesis, is called
the Book of the Four Covenants and is symbolised by Q; for the
"main stock" as a whole (as modified by an editorial process) the
title of Priestly Code and the symbol RQ (Q and Revisers) are
employed.
*************************
Now the Law, whose historical position we have to determine,
is the so-called "main stack," which, both by its contents
and by its origin, is entitled to be called the Priestly
Code, and will accordingly be so designated. The Priestly Code
preponderates over the rest of the legislation in force, as well as
in bulk; in all matters of primary importance it is the normal
and final authority. It was according to the mode furnished by it
that the Jews under Ezra ordered their sacred community, and upon it
are formed our conceptions of the Mosaic theocracy, with the
tabernacle at its centre, the high priest at its head, the priests
and Levites as its organs, the legitimate cultus as its regular
function. It is precisely this Law, so called par exceIlence,
that creates the difficulties out of which our problem rises, and
it is only in connection with it that the great difference of
opinion exists as to date. With regard to the Jehovistic document,
all are happily agreed that, substantially at all events, in
language, horizon, and other features, it dates from the golden age
of Hebrew literature, to which the finest parts of Judges, Samuel,
and Kings, and the oldest extant prophetical writings also
belong,--the period of the kings and prophets which preceded the
dissolution of the two Israelite kingdoms by the Assyrians.
About the origin of Deuteronomy there is still less dispute; in
all circles where appreciation of scientific results can be looked
for at all, it is recognised that it was composed in the same age
as that in which it was discovered, and that it was made the rule
of Josiah's reformation, which took place about a generation before
the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldaeans. It is only in
the case of the Priestly Code that opinions differ widely; for it
tries hard to imitate the costume of the Mosaic period, and, with
whatever success, to disguise its own. This is not nearly so much
the case with Deuteronomy, which, in fact, allows the real
situation (that of the period during which, Samaria having been
destroyed, only the kingdom of Judah continued to subsist) to
reveal itself very plainly through that which is assumed (xii.8,
xix.8). And the Jehovist does not even pretend to being a Mosaic
law of any kind; it aims at being a simple book of history; the
distance between the present and the past spoken of is not
concealed in the very least. It is here that all the marks are
found which attracted the attention of Abenezra and afterwards of
Spinoza, such as Gen. xii. 6 ("And the Canaanite was then in the
land"), Gen.xxxvi.31 ("These are the kings who reigned in Edom
before the children of Israel had a king"), Num. xii.6, 7, Deut.
xxxiv.10 ("There arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto
Moses"). The Priestly Code, on the other hand, guards itself
against all reference to later times and settled life in Canaan,
which both in the Jehovistic Book of the Covenant (Exodus
xxi.-xxiii.) and in Deuteronomy are the express basis of the
legislation: it keeps itself carefully and strictly within the
limits of the situation in the wilderness, for which in all
seriousness it seeks to give the law. It has actually been
successful, with its movable tabernacle, its wandering camp, and
other archaic details, in so concealing the true date of its
composition that its many serious inconsistencies with what we
know, from other sources, of Hebrew antiquity previous to the
exile, are only taken as proving that it lies far beyond all known
history, and on account of its enormous antiquity can hardly be
brought into any connection with it. It is the Priestly Code,
then, that presents us with our problem.
3. The instinct was a sound one which led criticism for the time
being to turn aside from the historical problem which had
originally presented itself to De Wette, and afterwards had been
more distinctly apprehended by George and Vatke, in order, in the
first instance, to come to some sort of clear understanding as to
the composition of the Pentateuch. But a mistake was committed
when it was supposed that by a separation of the sources (in which
operation attention was quite properly directed chiefly to
Genesis) that great historical question had been incidentally
answered. The fact was, that it had been merely put to sleep, and
Graf has the credit of having, after a considerable interval,
awakened it again. In doing so, indeed, he in turn laboured under
the disadvantage of not knowing what success had been achieved in
separating the sources, and thereby he became involved in a
desperate and utterly untenable assumption. This assumption,
however, had no necessary connection with his own hypothesis, and
at once fell to the ground when the level to which Hupfeld brought
the criticism of the text had been reached. Graf originally
followed the older view, espoused by Tuch in particular, that in
Genesis the Priestly Code, with its so obtrusively bare skeleton,
is the "main stock," and that it is the Jehovist who supplements,
and is therefore of course the later. But since, on the other
hand, he regarded the ritual legislature of the middle books as
much more recent than the work of the Jehovist, he was compelled to
tear it asunder as best he could from its introduction in Genesis,
and to separate the two halves of the Priestly Code by half a
millennium. But Hupfeld had long before made it quite clear that
the Jehovist is no mere supplementer, but the author of a perfectly
independent work, and that the passages, such as Gen. xx.-xxii.,
usually cited as examples of the way in which the Jehovist worked
over the "main stock," really proceed from quite another
source,--the Elohist. Thus the stumbling-block of Graf had already
been taken out of the way, and his path had been made clear by an
unlooked-for ally. Following Kuenen's suggestion, he did not
hesitate to take the helping-hand extended to him; he gave up his
violent division of the Priestly Code, and then had no difficulty
in deducing from the results which he had obtained with respect to
the main legal portion similar consequences with regard to the
narrative part in Genesis. /1/
***************************
1. K. H. Graf, Die s. g. Grundschrift des Pentateucks, in Merx's
Archiv (1869), pp. 466-477. As early as 1866 he had already expressed
himself in a letter to Kuenen November 12) as follows:-- "Vous me
faites pressentir une solution de cette enigme...c'est que les
parties elohistiques de la Genese seraient posterieures aux parties
jehovistiques." Compare Kuenen, Theol. Tijdschrift (1870), p.412.
Graf had also in this respect followed Reuss, who (ut supra,
p. 24) says of himself: "Le cote faible de ma critique a ete que,
a l'egard de tout ce qui ne rentrait pas dans les points enumeres
ci-dessus, je restais dans l'orniere tracee par mes devanciers,
admettant sans plus ample examen que le Pentateuque etait
l'ouvrage de l'HISTORIEN elohiste, complete par l'HISTORIEN
jehoviste, et ne me rendant pas compte de la maniere dont l'element
legal, dont je m'etais occupe exclusivement, serait venu se
joindre a l'element historique.
***************************
The foundations were now laid; it is Kuenen who has since done most
for the further development of the hypothesis./2/
**************************
2. A. Kuenen, Die Godsdienst van Israel, Haarlem, 1869-70 (Eng. transl.
Religion of Israel, 1874-5), and De priesterlijke Bestanddeelen
van Pentateuch en Josua, in Theol. Tijdschr.(1870), pp. 391-426.
**************************
The defenders of the prevailing opinion maintained their ground as well
as they could, but from long possession had got somewhat settled
on their lees. They raised against the assailants a series of
objections, all of which, however, laboured more or less under the
disadvantage that they rested upon the foundation which had
already been shattered. Passages were quoted from Amos and Hosea
as implying an acquaintance with the Priestly Code, but they were
not such as could make any impression on those who were already
persuaded that the latter was the more recent. Again it was
asserted, and almost with violence, that the Priestly Code could
not be later than Deuteronomy, and that the Deuteronomist actually
had it before him. But the evidences of this proved extremely
problematical, while, on the other hand, the dependence of
Deuteronomy, as a whole, on the Jehovist came out with the utmost
clearness. Appeal was made to the latest redaction of the entire
Hexateuch, a redaction which was assumed to be Deuteronomistic;
but this yielded the result that the deuteronomistic redaction
could nowhere be traced in any of the parts belonging to the
Priestly Code. Even the history of the language itself was
forced to render service against Graf: it had already been too
much the custom to deal with that as if it were soft wax. To say
all in a word, the arguments which were brought into play as a
rule derived all their force from a moral conviction that the
ritual legislation must be old, and could not possibly have been
committed to writing for the first time within the period of
Judaism; that it was not operative before then, that it did not
even admit of being carried into effect in the conditions that
prevailed previous to the exile, could not shake the conviction--
all the firmer because it did not rest on argument--that at least
it existed previously.
The firemen never came near the spot where the conflagration
raged; for it is only within the region of religious antiquities
and dominant religious ideas,--the region which Vatke in his
Biblische Theologie had occupied in its full breadth, and where the
real battle first kindled--that the controversy can be brought to a
definite issue. In making the following attempt in this direction,
I start from the comparison of the three constituents of the
Pentateuch,--the Priestly Code, Deuteronomy, and the work of the
Jehovist. The contents of the first two are, of course,
legislation, as we have seen; those of the third are narrative;
but, as the Decalogue (Exodus xx.), the Law of the two Tables
(Exodus xxxiv.), and the Book of the Covenant (Exodus xxi.-xxiii.)
show, the legislative element is not wholly absent from the
Jehovist, and much less is the historical absent from the Priestly
Code or Deuteronomy. Further, each writer's legal standpoint is
mirrored in his account of the history, and conversely; thus there
is no lack either of indirect or of direct points of comparison.
Now it is admitted that the three constituent elements are
separated from each other by wide intervals; the question then
arises, In what order? Deuteronomy stands in a relation of
comparative nearness both to the Jehovist and to the Priestly
Code; the distance between the last two is by far the
greatest,--so great that on this ground alone Ewald as early as
the year 183I (Stud. u. Krit., p. 604) declared it impossible
that the one could have been written to supplement the other.
Combining this observation with the undisputed priority of the
Jehovist over Deuteronomy, it will follow that the Priestly Code
stands last in the series. But such a consideration, although, so
far as I know, proceeding upon admitted data, has no value as long
as it confines itself to such mere generalities. It is necessary
to trace the succession of the three elements in detail, and at
once to test and to fix each by reference to an independent
standard, namely, the inner development of the history of Israel
so far as that is known to us by trustworthy testimonies, from
independent sources.
The literary and historical investigation on which we thus enter
is both wide and difficult. It falls into three parts. In the
first, which lays the foundations, the data relating to sacred
archaeology are brought together and arranged in such a way as to
show that in the Pentateuch the elements follow upon one another
and from one another precisely as the steps of the development
demonstrably do in the history. Almost involuntarily this
argument has taken the shape of a sort of history of the
ordinances of worship. Rude and colourless that history must be
confessed to be,--a fault due to the materials, which hardly allow
us to do more than mark the contrast between pre-exilic and
post-exilic, and, in a secondary measure, that between
Deuteronomic and pre-Deuteronomic. At the same time there is this
advantage arising out of the breadth of the periods treated: they
cannot fail to distinguish themselves from each other in a tangible
manner; it must be possible in the case of historical, and even of
legal works, to recognise whether they were written before or
after the exile. The second part, in many respects dependent on
the first, traces the influence of the successively prevailing
ideas and tendencies upon the shaping of historical tradition, and
follows the various phases in which that was conceived and set
forth. It contains, so to speak, a history of tradition. The
third part sums up the critical results of the preceding two, with
some further determining considerations, and concludes with a more
general survey.
The assumptions I make will find an ever-recurring justification
in the course of the investigation; the two principal are, that
the work of the Jehovist, so far as the nucleus of it is concerned,
belongs to the course of the Assyrian period, and that Deuteronomy
belongs to its close. Moreover, however strongly I am convinced
that the latter is to be dated in accordance with 2Kings xxii., I
do not, like Graf, so use this position as to make it the fulcrum
for my lever. Deuteronomy is the starting-point, not in the
sense that without it it would be impossible to accomplish
anything, but only because, when its position has been
historically ascertained, we cannot decline to go on, but must
demand that the position of the Priestly Code should also be fixed
by reference to history. My inquiry proceeds on a broader basis
than that of Graf, and comes nearer to that of Vatke, from whom
indeed I gratefully acknowledge myself to have learnt best and
most.
A. HISTORY OF THE ORDINANCES OF WORSHIP.
" Legem non habentes natura faciunt legis opera."--Romans ii.
[ "(When Gentiles) who do not have the law, do instinctively
what the law requires...." Romans 2:14 NRSV ]
CHAPTER I. THE PLACE OF WORSHIP.
As we learn from the New Testament, the Jews and the Samaritans in
the days of Jesus were not agreed on the question which was the
proper place of worship, but that there could be only one was
taken to be as certain as the unity of God Himself. The Jews
maintained that place to be the temple at Jerusalem, and when it
was destroyed they ceased to sacrifice. But this oneness of the
sanctuary in Israel was not originally recognised either in fact
or in law; it was a slow growth of time. With the help of the Old
Testament we are still quite able to trace the process. In doing
so, it is possible to distinguish several stages of development.
We shall accordingly proceed to inquire whether the three
constituent parts of the Pentateuch give tokens of any
relationship to one or other of these; whether and how they fall
in with the course of the historical development which we are able
to follow by the aid of the historical and prophetic books from
the period of the Judges onwards.
I.I.1. For the earliest period of the history of Israel, all
that precedes the building of the temple, not a trace can be found
of any sanctuary of exclusive legitimacy. In the Books of Judges
and Samuel hardly a place is mentioned at which we have not at
least casual mention of an altar and of sacrifice. In great
measure this multiplicity of sanctuaries was part of the heritage
taken over from the Canaanites by the Hebrews; as they
appropriated the towns and the culture generally of the previous
inhabitants, so also did they take possession of their sacred
piaces. The system of high places (Bamoth), with all the
apparatus thereto belonging, is certainly Canaanite originally
(Deut. xii.2, 30; Num. xxxiii.52; Exodus xxxiv.12 seq.), but
afterwards is of quite general occurrence among the Hebrews. At
Shechem and Gibeon the transition takes place almost in the full
light of history; some other old-Israelite places of worship,
certain of which are afterwards represented as Levitical towns,
betray their origin by their names at least, e.g., Bethshemesh or
Ir Heres (Sun-town), and Ashtaroth Karnaim (the two-horned
Astarte). In the popular recollection, also, the memory of the
fact that many of the most prominent sacrificial seats were
already in existence at the date of the immigration continues to
survive. Shechem, Bethel, Beersheba, figure in Genesis as
instituted by the patriarchs; other equally important holy
sites, not so. The reason for the distinction can only lie in a
consciousness of the more recent origin of the latter; those of
the one class had been found by the people when they came, those
of the other category they had themselves established. For of
course, if the Hebrews did not hesitate to appropriate to
themselves the old holy places of the country, neither did they
feel any difficulty in instituting new ones. In Gilgal and
Shiloh, in the fixed camps where, in the first instance, they had
found a permanent foothold in Palestine proper, there forthwith
arose important centres of worship; so likewise in other places of
political importance, even in such as only temporarily come into
prominence, as Ophrah, Ramah, and Nob near Gibeah. And, apart from
the greater cities with their more or less regular religious
service, it is perfectly permissible to erect an altar extempore,
and offer sacrifice wherever an occasion presents itself. When,
after the battle of Michmash, the people, tired and hungry, fell
upon the cattle they had taken, and began to devour the flesh with
the blood (that is, without pouring out the blood on the altar),
Saul caused a great stone to be erected, and ordered that every
man should slaughter his ox or his sheep there. This was the
first altar which Saul erected to Jehovah, adds the narrator,
certainly not as a reproach, nor even to signalise his conduct as
anything surprising or exceptional. The instance is all the more
instructive, because it shows how the prohibition to eat flesh
without rendering the blood back to God at a time when the people
did not live crowded together within a quite limited area
necessarily presupposed liberty to sacrifice anywhere--or to
slaughter anywhere; for originally the two words are absolutely
synonymous.
It need not be said that the sacrificial seats (even when the
improvised ones are left out of account) were not all alike in the
regard in which they were held, or in the frequency with which
they were resorted to. Besides purely local ones, there were
others to which pilgrimages were made from far and near. Towards
the close of the period of the judges, Shiloh appears to have
acquired an importance that perhaps extended even beyond the limits
of the tribe of Joseph. By a later age the temple there was even
regarded as the prototype of the temple of Solomon, that is, as the
one legitimate place of worship to which Jehovah had made a grant
of all the burnt-offerings of the children of Israel (Jer. vii.12;
1Samuel ii. 27-36). But, in point-of fact, if a prosperous man of
Ephraim or Benjamin made a pilgrimage to the joyful festival at
Shiloh at the turn of the year, the reason for his doing so was not
that he could have had no opportunity at his home in Ramah or
Gibeah for eating and drinking before the Lord. Any strict
centralisation is for that period inconceivable, alike in the
religious as in every other sphere. This is seen even in the
circumstance that the destruction of the temple of Shiloh, the
priesthood of which we find officiating at Nob a little later, did
not exercise the smallest modifying influence upon the character
and position of the cultus; Shiloh disappears quietly from the
scene, and is not mentioned again until we learn from Jeremiah that
at least from the time when Solomon's temple was founded its temple
lay in ruins.
For the period during which the temple of Jerusalem was not yet in
existence, even the latest redaction of the historical books (which
perhaps does not everywhere proceed from the same hand, but all
dates from the same period--that of the Babylonian exile--and has
its origin in the same spirit) leaves untouched the multiplicity
of altars and of holy places. No king after Solomon is left
uncensured for having tolerated the high places, but Samuel is
permitted in his proper person to preside over a sacrificial feast
at the Bamah of his native town, and Solomon at the beginning of
his reign to institute a similar one at the great Bamah of Gibeon,
without being blamed. The offensive name is again and again
employed in the most innocent manner in 1Samuel ix., x., and the
later editors allow it to pass unchallenged. The principle which
guides this apparently unequal distribution of censure becomes
clear from 1Kings iii. 2: "The people sacrificed upon the high
places, for as yet no house to the name of Jehovah had been
built." Not until the house had been built to the name of
Jehovah--such is the idea--did the law come into force which
forbade having other places of worship besides./1/
**********************************
1. Compare 1Kings viii. 16. According to Deut. xii.10 seq.,
the local unity of worship becomes law from the time when
the Israelites have found rest (menuha). Comparing 2Samuel vii.11
and 1Kings v. 18 (A.V., v.4), we find that "menuha" first came in
with David and Solomon. The period of the judges must at that time
have been regarded as much shorter than appears in the present chronology.
***********************************
From the building of the temple of Solomon, which is also treated
as a leading epoch in chronology, a new period in the history of worship
is accordingly dated,--and to a certain extent with justice.
The monarchy in Israel owed its origin to the need which, under severe
external pressure, had come to be felt for bringing together
into the oneness of a people and a kingdom the hitherto
very loosely connected tribes and families of the Hebrews;
it had an avowedly centralising tendency, which very naturally
laid hold of the cultus as an appropriate means for the attainment
of the political end. Gideon even, the first who came near
a regal position, erected a costly sanctuary in his city, Ophrah.
David caused the ark of Jehovah to be fetched into his fortress
on Mount Sion, and attached value to the circumstance
of having for its priest the representative of the old family
which had formerly kept it at Shiloh. Solomon's temple also was
designed to increase the attractiveness of the city of his
residence. It is indubitable that in this way political
centralisation gave an impulse to a greater centralisation of
worship also, and the tendency towards the latter continued to
operate after the separation of the two kingdoms,--in Israel not
quite in the same manner as in Judah. Royal priests, great
national temples, festal gatherings of the whole people, sacrifices
on an enormous scale, these were the traits by which the cultus,
previously (as it would seem) very simple, now showed the impress
of a new time. One other fact is significant: the domestic feasts
and sacrifices of single families, which in David's time must still
have been general, gradually declined and lost their importance as
social circles widened and life became more public.
But this way of regarding the influence of the monarchy upon the
history of the worship is not that of the author of the Books of
Kings. He views the temple of Solomon as a work undertaken
exclusively in the interests of pure worship, and as differing
entirely in origin from the sacred buildings of the kings of
Israel, with which accordingly it is not compared, but contrasted
as the genuine is contrasted with the spurious. It is in its
nature unique, and from the outset had the design of setting aside
all other holy places,--a religious design independent of and
unconnected with politics. The view, however, is unhistorical; it
carries back to the original date of the temple, and imports into
the purpose of its foundation the significance which it had
acquired in Judah shortly before the exile. In reality the
temple was not at the outset all that it afterwards became. Its
influence was due to its own weight, and not to a monopoly
conferred by Solomon. We nowhere learn that that king, like a
forerunner of Josiah, in order to favour his new sanctuary sought
to abolish all the others; there is not the faintest historical
trace of any such sudden and violent interference with the
previously existing arrangements of worship. Never once did
Solomon's successors, confined though they were to the little
territory of Judah, and therefore in a position in which the
experiment might perhaps have been practicable, make the attempt
(which certainly would have been in their interest) to concentrate
all public worship within their own temple, though in other
directions we find them exercising a very arbitrary control over
affairs of religion. The high places were not removed; this is
what is regularly told us in the case of them all. For Israel
properly so called, Jerusalem was at no time, properly speaking,
the place which Jehovah had chosen; least of all was it so after
the division of the kingdom.
The Ephraimites flocked in troops through the entire length of the
southern kingdom as pilgrims to Beersheba, and, in common with the
men of Judah, to Gilgal on the frontier. Jerusalem they left
unvisited. In their own land they served Jehovah at Bethel and
Dan, at Shechem and Samaria, at Penuel and Mizpah, and at many
other places. Every town had its Bamah, in the earlier times
generally on an open site at the top of the hill on the slopes of
which the houses were. Elijah, that great zealot for purity of
worship, was so far from being offended by the high places and the
multiplicity of altars to Jehovah that their destruction brought
bitterness to his soul as the height of wickedness, and with his
own hand he rebuilt the altar that had fallen into ruins on Mount
Carmel. And that the improvised offering on extraordinary
occasions had also not fallen into disuse is shown by the case of
Elisha, who, when his call came as he was following the plough,
hewed his oxen to pieces on the spot and sacrificed. In this
respect matters after the building of Solomon's temple continued to
be just as they had been before. If people and judges or kings
alike, priests and prophets, men like Samuel and Elijah, sacrificed
without hesitation whenever occasion and opportunity presented
themselves, it is manifest that during the whole of that period
nobody had the faintest suspicion that such conduct was heretical
and forbidden. If a theophany made known to Joshua the sanctity
of Gilgal, gave occasion to Gideon and Manoah to rear altars at
their homes, drew the attention of David to the threshing-floor of
Araunah, Jehovah Himself was regarded as the proper founder of all
these sanctuaries,--and this not merely at the period of the
Judges, but more indubitably still at that of the narrator of
these legends. He rewarded Solomon's first sacrifice on the great
Bamah at Gibeon with a gracious revelation, and cannot, therefore,
have been displeased by it. After all this, it is absurd to speak
of any want of legality in what was then the ordinary practice;
throughout the whole of the earlier period of the history of
Israel, the restriction of worship to a single selected place was
unknown to any one even as a pious desire. Men believed themselves
indeed to be nearer God at Bethel or at Jerusalem than at any
indifferent place, but of such gates of heaven there were several;
and after all, the ruling idea was that which finds its
most distinct expression in 2Kings v.17,--that Palestine as a whole
was Jehovah's house, His ground and territory. Not outside of
Jerusalem, but outside of Canaan had one to sojourn far from His
presence, under the dominion and (cujus regio ejus religio) in the
service of strange gods. The sanctity of the land did not depend
on that of the temple; the reverse was the case. /1/
***********************************
1. Gen. iv.14, 16: when Cain is driven out of the land (Canaan),
he is driven from the presence of Jehovah (Jonah i.3, 10).
Gen. xlvi.4: Jacob is not to hesitate about going down into Egypt,
for Jehovah will, by a special act of grace, change His dwelling-place
along with him. Exodus xv.17: "Thou broughtest thy people to the mountain
of thine inheritance, to the place which thou hadst prepared for
thyself to dwell in," the explanation which follows, "to the
sanctuary which thy hand had established," is out of place, for
the mountain of the inheritance can only be the mountainous land
of Palestine. 1Samuel xxvi.19: David, driven by Saul into foreign
parts, is thereby violently sundered from his family share in
the inheritance of Jehovah, and compelled to serve other gods.
Hos. viii.1: one like an eagle comes against the house of
Jehovah, i.e., the Assyrian comes against Jehovah's land. Hos.
ix.15: "I will drive them out of mine house," i.e., the Israelites
out of their land. Most distinct is the language of Hos. ix.3-5:
"They shall not continue to dwell in Jehovah's land; Ephraim must
back to Egypt, and must eat that which is unclean in Assyria. They
shall not any more offer wine-offerings to Jehovah, or set forth
offerings [read with Kuenen Y(RKW for Y(RBW ] before Him; their
bread is as the bread of mourners; whosoever eats of it is
polluted, for their bread shall be only for the staying of hunger,
and shall not be brought into the house of Jehovah. What indeed
will ye do in the time of the solemn assembly and in the day of
the feast of Jehovah? "Compare Jer. xvi.13; Ezek. iv.13; Mal.
ii.11; 2Kings xvii.25 seq. It is also possible that the "great
indignation" of 2Kings iii.27 is regarded less as Jehovah's than as
that of Chemosh, in whose land the army of Israel is at the time.
*******************************************
I.I.2. A change in this respect first begins to be prepared at that
important epoch of the religious history of Israel which is marked
by the fall of Samaria and the rise of the prophets connected
therewith. Amos and Hosea presuppose a condition of matters just
such as has been described: everywhere--in the towns, on the
mountains, under green trees--a multitude of sanctuaries and
altars, at which Jehovah is served in good faith, not with the
purpose of provoking Him, but in order to gain His favour. The
language held by these men was one hitherto unheard of when they
declared that Gilgal, and Bethel, and Beersheba, Jehovah's
favourite seats, were an abomination to Him; that the gifts and
offerings with which He was honoured there kindled His wrath
instead of appeasing it; that Israel was destined to be buried
under the ruins of His temples, where protection and refuge were
sought (Amos ix.). What did they mean ? It would be to
misunderstand the prophets to suppose that they took offence at
the holy places-- which Amos still calls Bamoth (vii.9), and that
too not in scorn, but with the deepest pathos--in and by
themselves, on account of their being more than one, or not being
the right ones. Their zeal is directed, not against the places,
but against the cultus there carried on, and, in fact not merely
against its false character as containing all manner of abuses, but
almost more against itself, against the false value attached to it.
The common idea was that just as Moab showed itself to be the
people of Chemosh because it brought to Chemosh its offerings and
gifts, so Israel proved itself Jehovah's people by dedicating its
worship to Him, and was such all the more surely as its worship
was zealous and splendid; in times of danger and need, when His
help was peculiarly required, the zeal of the worshippers was
doubled and trebled. It is against this that the prophets raise
their protest while they demand quite other performances as a
living manifestation of the relation of Israel to Jehovah. This
was the reason of their so great hostility to the cultus, and the
source of their antipathy to the great sanctuaries, where
superstitious zeal outdid itself; it was this that provoked their
wrath against the multiplicity of the altars which flourished so
luxuriantly on the soil of a false confidence. That the holy
places should be abolished, but the cultus itself remain as before
the main concern of religion, only limited to a single locality
was by no means their wish; but at the same time, in point of
fact, it came about as an incidental result of their teaching that
the high place in Jerusalem ultimately abolished all the other
Bamoth. External circumstances, it must be added, contributed most
essentially towards the result.
As long as the northern kingdom stood, it was there that the main
current of lsraelite life manifested itself; a glance into the
Books of Kings or into that of Amos is enough to make this clear.
In Jerusalem, indeed, the days of David and of Solomon remained
unforgotten; yearning memories went back to them, and great
pretensions were based upon them, but with these the actual state
of matters only faintly corresponded. When Samaria fell, Israel
shrivelled up to the narrow dimensions of Judah, which alone
survived as the people of Jehovah. Thereby the field was left
clear for Jerusalem. The royal city had always had a weighty
preponderance over the little kingdom, and within it, again, the
town had yielded in importance to the temple. From the few
narratives we have relating to Judah one almost gathers an
impression as if it had no other concern besides those of the
temple; the kings in particular appear to have regarded the
charge of their palace sanctuary as the chief of all their
cares./1/
******************************************
1. Nearly all the Judaean narratives in the Books of Kings relate
to the temple and the measures taken by the ruling princes with
reference to this their sanctuary.
**********************************************
In this way the increased importance of Judah after the fall of Samaria
accrued in the first instance to the benefit of the capital
and its sanctuary, especially as what Judah gained by the fall
of her rival was not so much political strength as an increase
of religious self-consciousness. If the great house of God
upon Mount Zion had always overtopped the other shrines in Judah,
it now stood without any equal in all Israel. But it was the prophets
who led the way in determining the inferences to be drawn from the change
in the face of things. Hitherto they had principally had their eyes
upon the northern kingdom, its threatened collapse, and the
wickedness of its inhabitants, and thus had poured out their wrath
more particularly upon the places of worship there. Judah they
judged more favourably, both on personal and on substantial
grounds, and they hoped for its preservation, not concealing their
sympathies for Jerusalem (Amos i.2). Under the impression produced
by their discourses accordingly, the fall of Samaria was
interpreted as a judgment of God against the sinful kingdom and in
favour of the fallen house of David, and the destruction of the
sanctuaries of Israel was accepted as an unmistakable declaration
on Jehovah's part against His older seats on behalf of His
favourite dwelling on Zion. Finally, the fact that twenty years
afterwards Jerusalem made her triumphant escape from the danger
which had proved fatal to her haughty rival, that at the critical
moment the Assyrians under Sennacherib were suddenly constrained
to withdraw from her, raised to the highest pitch the veneration
in which the temple was held. In this connection special emphasis
is usually laid-- and with justice--upon the prophetical activity
of Isaiah, whose confidence in the firm foundation of Zion
continued unmoved, even when the rock began to shake in an alarming
way. Only it must not be forgotten that the significance of
Jerusalem to Isaiah did not arise from the temple of Solomon, but
from the fact that it was the city of David and the focus of his
kingdom, the central point, not of the cultus, but of the
sovereignty of Jehovah over His people. The holy mount was to
him the entire city as a political unity, with its citizens,
councillors, and judges (xi.9); his faith in the sure foundation
on which Zion rested was nothing more than a faith in the living
presence of Jehovah in the camp of Israel. But the contemporaries
of the prophet interpreted otherwise his words and the events which
had occurred. In their view Jehovah dwelt on Zion because His
house was there; it was the temple that had been shown by history
to be His true seat, and its inviolability was accordingly the
pledge of the indestructibility of the nation. This belief was
quite general in Jeremiah's time, as is seen in the extremely
vivid picture of the seventh chapter of his book; but even as
early as the time of Micah, in the first third of the seventh
century, the temple must have been reckoned a house of God of an
altogether peculiar order, so as to make it a paradox to put it on
a level with the Bamoth of Judah, and a thing unheard of to believe
in its destruction.
At the same time, notwithstanding the high and universal reverence
in which the temple was held, the other sanctuaries still
continued, in the first instance, to subsist alongside of it.
King Hezekiah indeed is said to have even then made an attempt
to abolish them, but the attempt, having passed away without leaving
any trace, is of a doubtful nature. It is certain that the
prophet Isaiah did not labour for the removal of the Bamoth. In
one of his latest discourses his anticipation for that time of
righteousness and the fear of God which is to dawn after the
Assyrian crisis is: "Then shall ye defile the silver covering of
your graven images and the golden plating of your molten images--ye
shall cast them away as a thing polluted; Begone! shall ye say
unto them" (xxx.22). If he thus hopes for a purification from
superstitious accretions of the places where Jehovah is worshipped,
it is clear that he is not thinking of their total abolition. Not
until about a century after the destruction of Samaria did men
venture to draw the practical conclusion from the belief in the
unique character of the temple at Jerusalem. That this was not
done from a mere desire to be logical, but with a view to further
reforms, need not be said. With the tone of repudiation in which
the earlier prophets, in the zeal of their opposition, had
occasionally spoken of practices of worship at large, there was
nothing to be achieved; the thing to be aimed at was not
abolition, but reformation, and the end it was believed would be
helped by concentration of all ritual in the capital. Prophets
and priests appear to have made common cause in the prosecution of
the work. It was the high priest Hilkiah who in the first instance
called attention to the discovered book which was to be made the
basis of action; the prophetess Huldah confirmed its divine
contents; the priests and prophets were a prominent element in the
assembly at which the new law was promulgated and sworn to. Now
an intimate fellowship between these two leading classes appears to
be characteristic of the whole course of the religious movement in
Judah, and to have been necessarily connected with the lines on
which that movement advanced; /1/
******************************
1. While Hosea, the man of northern Israel, frequently assails
the clergy of his home, and lays upon them the chief share of the
blame for the depraved and blinded condition of the people, Isaiah
even in his fiercest declamation against the superstitious worship
of the multitude, has not a word to say against the priests, with
whose chief, Uriah, on the contrary, he stands in a relation of
great intimacy. But it is from the Book of Jeremiah, the best
mirror of the contemporary relations in Judah, that the close
connection between priests and prophets can be gathered most
particularly. To a certain extent they shared the possession of
the sanctuary between them. (Compare Lam. ii.20.)
***************************************
we shall be justified therefore in assuming that the display
of harmony between them on this occasion was not got up merely
for the purposes of scenic effect, but that the change
in the national cultus now proposed was really the common suggestion
of prophets and priests. In point of fact, such a change was equally
in accordance with the interests of the temple and with those
of the prophetic party of reform. To the last named the restriction
of the sacrificial worship must have in itself seemed an advantage;
to it in later times the complete abolition of sacrifice was mainly due,
and something of the later effect doubtless lay in the original
intention. Then, too, the Jehovah of Hebron was only too easily
regarded as distinct from the Jehovah of Bethshemesh or of Bethel,
and so a strictly monarchical conception of God naturally led to
the conclusion that the place of His dwelling and of His worship
could also only be one. All writers of the Chaldaean period
associate monotheism in the closest way with unity of worship
(Jer. ii.28, xi.13). And the choice of the locality could
present no difficulty; the central point of the kingdom had of
necessity also to become the central point of the worship. Even
Jerusalem and the house of Jehovah there might need some cleansing,
but it was clearly entitled to a preference over the obscure
local altars. It was the seat of all higher culture, Iying under
the prophets' eyes, much more readily accessible to light and
air, reform and control. It is also possible, moreover, that the
Canaanite origin of most of the Bamoth, which is not unknown, for
example, to Deuteronomy, may have helped to discredit them, while,
on the other hand, the founding of Jerusalem belonged to the
proudest memories of Israelite history, and the Ark, which had been
the origin of the temple there, had a certain right to be
considered the one genuine Mosaic sanctuary. /1/
************************************
1. Luther in his address to the princes of Germany counsels
in the twentieth place that the field chapels and churches be destroyed,
as devices of the devil used by him to strengthen covetousness,
to set up a false and spurious faith, to weaken parochial churches,
to increase taverns and fornication, to squander money and labour
to no purpose, and merely to lead the poor people about by the nose.
(Niemeyer's Reprint, p. 54 )
*************************************
In the eighteenth year of Josiah, 601 B.C., the first heavy blow fell
upon the local sacrificial places. How vigorously the king set to
work, how new were the measures taken, and how deeply they cut,
can be learned from the narrative of 2Kings xxiii. Yet what a
vitality did the green trees upon the high mountains still
continue to show! Even now they were but polled, not uprooted.
After Josiah's death we again see Bamoth appearing on all hands,
not merely in the country, but even in the capital itself.
Jeremiah has to lament that there are as many altars as towns in
Judah. All that had been attained by the reforming party was
that they could now appeal to a written law that had been solemnly
sworn to by the whole people, standing ever an immovable witness
to the rights of God. But to bring it again into force and to
carry it out was no easy matter, and would certainly have been
impossible to the unaided efforts of the prophets--a Jeremiah or an
Ezekiel.
I.3 Had the people of Judah remained in peaceful possession of their
land, the reformation of Josiah would hardly have penetrated to
the masses; the threads uniting the present with the past were too
strong. To induce the people to regard as idolatrous and heretical
centres of iniquity the Bamoth, with which from ancestral times
the holiest memories were associated, and some of which, like
Hebron and Beersheba, had been set up by Abraham and Isaac in
person, required a complete breaking-off of the natural tradition
of life, a total severance of all connection with inherited
conditions. This was accomplished by means of the Babylonian
exile, which violently tore the nation away from its native soil,
and kept it apart for half a century,--a breach of historical
continuity than which it is almost impossible to conceive a
greater. The new generation had no natural, but only an
artificial relation to the times of old; the firmly rooted
growths of the old soil, regarded as thorns by the pious, were
extirpated, and the freshly ploughed fallows ready for a new
sowing. It is, of course, far from being the case that the whole
people at that time underwent a general conversion in the sense of
the prophets. Perhaps the majority totally gave up the past, but
just on that account became lost among the heathen, and never
subsequently came into notice. Only the pious ones, who with
trembling followed Jehovah's word, were left as a remnant; they
alone had the strength to maintain the Jewish individuality amid
the medley of nationalities into which they had been thrown.
From the exile there returned, not the nation, but a religious
sect,--those, namely, who had given themselves up body and soul to
the reformation ideas. It is no wonder that to these people, who,
besides, on their return, all settled in the immediate
neighbourhood of Jerusalem, the thought never once occurred of
restoring the local cults. It cost them no struggle to allow the
destroyed Bamoth to continue Iying in ruins; the principle had
become part of their very being, that the one God had also but one
place of worship, and thenceforward for all time coming this was
regarded as a thing of course.
I.II
Such was the actual historical course of the centralisation of
the cultus, and such the three stadia which can be distinguished.
The question now presents itself, whether it is possible to detect
a correspondence between the phases of the actual course of events
and those of the legislation relating to this subject. All three
portions of the legislation contain ordinances on the subject of
sacrificial places and offerings. It may be taken for granted
that in some way or other these have their roots in history, and
do not merely hang in the air, quite away from or above the solid
ground of actuality.
I.II.1. The main Jehovistic law, the so-called Book of the Covenant,
contains (Exodus xx.24-26) the following ordinance: "An altar of
earth shalt thou make unto me, and thereon shalt thou sacrifice thy
burnt offerings and thy peace-offerings, thy sheep and thine
oxen; in place where I cause my name to be honoured will I come
unto and will bless thee. Or if thou wilt make me an altar of
stones, thou shalt not build it of hewn stones, for if thou hast
lifted up thy tool upon it thou hast polluted it. And thou shalt
not go up to mine altar by steps, that thy nakedness be not
discovered before it." Unquestionably it is not the altar of the
tabernacle, which was made of wood and plated over with brass, nor
that of Solomon's temple, which on its eastern side had a flight of
steps, /1/
**************************************
1. The altar of the second temple had no steps, but a sloping ascent
to it, as also, according to the belief of the Jews, had that of the
tabernacle. The reason, moreover, for which in Exodus xx.26 steps
are forbidden, disappears when the priests are provided with
breeches (Exodus xxviii.42).
****************************************
and had a passage right round it at half its height, that is here
described as the only true one. On the other hand, it is obvious
that a multiplicity of altars is not merely regarded as permissible,
but assumed as a matter of course. For no stress at all is laid
upon having always the same sacrificial seat, whether fixed or to be
moved about from place to place; earth and unhewn stones /2/ of the field
****************************************
2. The plural "stones" is perhaps worthy of note. There were also
sacrificial places consisting of one great stone (1Samuel xiv.33,
vi.14, 15; 2Samuel xx.8; Judges vi.20, xiii.19, 20; 1Kings i.9); to the same
category also doubtless belongs originally the threshing-floor of
Araunah, 2Samuel xxiv.21; compare Ezra iii.3, [ (L MKWNTW ]. But
inasmuch as such single sacred stones easily came into a
mythological relation to the Deity, offence was taken at them, as
appears from Judges vi.22-24, where the rock altar, the stone under
the oak which was conceived of as the seat of the theophany, upon
which Gideon offers, and out of which the flame issues (vi.19-21),
is corrected into an altar upon the rock. The macceboth are
distinguished from the altar in Exodus xxiv.4, yet elsewhere
clearly put on the same plane with it (Gen. xxxiii.20), and
everywhere more or less identified with the Deity (Gen. xxviii.).
********************************************
can be found everywhere, and such an altar falls to pieces just as
readily as it is built. A choice of two kinds of material is also
given, which surely implies that the lawgiver thought of more than
one altar; and not at the place, but at every place where He causes
His name to be honoured will Jehovah come to His worshippers and
bless them. Thus the law now under consideration is in harmony
with the custom and usage of the first historical period, has its
root therein, and gives sanction to it. Certainly the liberty to
sacrifice everywhere seems to be somewhat restricted by the added
clause, "in every place where I cause my name to be honoured."
But this means nothing more than that the spots where intercourse
between earth and heaven took place were not willingly regarded
as arbitrarily chosen, but, on the contrary, were considered as
having been somehow or other selected by the Deity Himself for
His service.
In perfect correspondence with the Jehovistic law is the
Jehovistic narrative of the Pentateuch, as, in particular, the
story of the patriarchs in J and E very clearly shows. At every
place where they take up their abode or make a passing stay, the
fathers of the nation, according to this authority, erect altars,
set up memorial stones, plant trees, dig wells. This does not take
place at indifferent and casual localities, but at Shechem and
Bethel in Ephraim, at Hebron and Beersheba in Judah, at Mizpah,
Mahanaim, and Penuel in Gilead; nowhere but at famous and
immemorially holy places of worship. It is on this that the
interest of such notifications depends; they are no mere
antiquarian facts, but full of the most living significance for the
present of the narrator. The altar built by Abraham at Shechem is
the altar on which sacrifice still continues to be made, and bears
"even unto this day" the name which the patriarch gave it. On the
spot where at Hebron he first entertained Jehovah, there down to
the present day the table has continued to be spread; even as
Isaac himself did, so do his sons still swear Amosos viii.14; Hos.
iv.15) by the sacred well of Beersheba, which he digged, and
sacrifice there upon the altar which he built, under the tamarisk
which he planted. The stone which Jacob consecrated at Bethel the
generation of the living continues to anoint, paying the tithes
which of old he vowed to the house of God there. This also is the
reason why the sacred localities are so well known to the
narrator, and are punctually and accurately recorded
notwithstanding the four hundred years of the Egyptian sojourn,
which otherwise would have made their identification a matter of
some little difficulty. The altar which Abraham built at Bethel
stands upon the hill to the east of the town, between Bethel on the
west and Ai on the east; others are determined by means of a tree
or a well, as that of Shechem or Beersheba. /1/
*******************************
1. The correct explanation of this is found in Ewald, Gesch. d. V.
lsraels, i. 436 seq. (3d edit.). A. Bernstein (Ursprung der Sagen
von Abrabam, etc., Berlin, 1871) drags in politics in a repulsive way.
"He does not indeed actually enter Shechem and Bethel-- these are places
hostile to Judah--but in a genuine spirit of Jewish demonstration
he builds altars in their vicinity and calls on the name of
Jehovah" (p. 22). Rather, he builds the altars precisely on the
places where, as can be shown, they afterwards stood, and that was
not inside the towns. In Gen. xviii. also the oak of Mamre is
employed to fix not Abraham's residence, but the place of Jehovah's
appearing.
****************************************************************
But of course it was not intended to throw dishonour upon the
cultus of the present when its institution was ascribed to the
fathers of the nation. Rather, on the contrary, do these legends
glorify the origin of the sanctuaries to which they are attached,
and surround them with the nimbus of a venerable consecration. All
the more as the altars, as a rule, are not built by the patriarchs
according to their own private judgment wheresoever they please;
on the contrary, a theophany calls attention to, or at least
afterwards confirms, the holiness of the place. Jehovah appears at
Shechem to Abraham, who thereupon builds the altar "to Jehovah who
had appeared unto him;" he partakes of his hospitality under the
oak of Mamre, which is the origin of the sacrificial service there;
He shows him the place where he is to make an offering of his son,
and here the sanctuary continues to exist. On the first night of
Isaac's sleeping on the sacred soil of Beersheba (xxvi.24) he
receives a visit from the Numen there residing, and in consequence
rears his altar. Surprised by profane glances, Jehovah acts as a
destroyer, but Himself spontaneously points out to His favoured
ones the places where it is His pleasure to allow Himself to be
seen; and where men have seen Him and yet lived, there a sanctuary
marks the open way of access to Him. The substance of the
revelation is in these cases comparatively indifferent: "I am
God." What is of importance is the theophany in and for itself,
its occurrence on that particular place. It must not be regarded
as an isolated fact, but rather as the striking commencement of an
intercourse [ R)H PNY YHWH ] between God and man which is destined
to be continued at this spot, and also as the first and strongest
expression of the sanctity of the soil. This way of looking at
the thing appears most clearly and with incomparable charm in the
story of the ladder which Jacob saw at Bethel. "He dreamed, and
behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to
heaven, and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on
it. And he was afraid and said, How dreadful is this place! This
is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of
heaven." The ladder stands at the place not at this moment merely,
but continually, and, as it were, by nature. Bethel--so Jacob
perceives from this--is a place where heaven and earth meet, where
the angels ascend and descend, to carry on the communication
between earth and heaven ordained by God at this gate.
All this is only to be understood as a glorification of the
relations and arrangements of the cultus as we find them (say) in
the first centuries of the divided kingdom. All that seems
offensive and heathenish to a later age is here consecrated and
countenanced by Jehovah Himself and His favoured ones,-- the high
places, the memorial stones (maccceboth), the trees, the wells. /1/
******************************
1. But it is only the public cultus and that of certain leading
sanctuaries that is thus glorified; on the other hand, the domestic
worship of seraphim, to which the women are specially attached,
is already discountenanced (in E) by Jacob. Asherim are not
alluded to, molten images are rejected, particularly by E.
Here perhaps a correction of the ancient legend has already
taken place in JE.
************************************
An essential agreement prevails between the Jehovistic law
which sanctions the existing seats of worship and the Jehovistic
narrative; the latter is as regards its nucleus perhaps somewhat older.
Both obviously belong to the pre-prophetic period; a later revision
of the narrative in the prophetic sense has not altered the essential
character of its fundamental elements. It is inconceivable that
Amos or Hosea, or any like-minded person, could go with such
sympathising love and believing reverence into narratives which only
served to invest with a still brighter nimbus and higher respect
the existing religious worship, carried on by the people
on the high places of Isaac as their holiest occupation.
I.II.2. The Jehovistic Book of the Covenant lies indeed at the
foundation of Deuteronomy, but in one point they differ
materially, and that precisely the one which concerns us here.
As there, so here also, the legislation properly so called begins
(Deut. xii.) with an ordinance relating to the service of the
altar; but now we have Moses addressing the Israeites in the
following terms: "When ye come into the land of Canaan, ye shall
utterly destroy all the places of worship which ye find there,
and ye shall not worship Jehovah your God after the manner in which
the heathen serve theirs. Nay, but only unto the place which the
Lord your God shall choose out of all your tribes for His
habitation shall ye seek, and thither shall ye bring your offerings
and gifts, and there shall ye eat before Him and rejoice. Here at
this day we do every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes, but
when ye have found fixed abodes, and rest from your enemies round
about, then shall the place which Jehovah shall choose for His
habitation in one of your tribes be the one place to which ye shall
bring your offerings and gifts. Take heed that ye offer not in
every place that ye see; ye may not eat your holy gifts in
every town, but only in the place which Jehovah shall choose."
The Law is never weary of again and again repeating its
injunction of local unity of worship. In doing so, it is in
conscious opposition to "the things that we do here this day," and
throughout has a polemical and reforming attitude towards existing
usage. It is rightly therefore assigned by historical criticism
to the period of the attacks made on the Bamoth by the reforming
party at Jerusalem. As the Book of the Covenant, and the whole
Jehovistic writing in genera], reflects the first pre-prophetic
period in the history of the cultus, so Deuteronomy is the legal
expression of the second period of struggle and transition. The
historical order is all the more certain because the literary
dependence of Deuteronomy on the Jehovistic laws and narratives
can be demonstrated independently, and is an admitted fact. From
this the step is easy to the belief that the work whose discovery
gave occasion to King Josiah to destroy the local sanctuaries was
this very Book of Deuteronomy, which originally must have had an
independent existence, and a shorter form than at present. This
alone, at least, of all the books of the Pentateuch, gives so
imperious an expression to the restriction of the sacrificial
worship to the one chosen place; here only does the demand make
itself so felt in its aggressive novelty and dominate the whole
tendency of the law-maker. The old material which he makes use
of is invariably shaped with a view to this, and on all hands he
follows the rule out to its logical consequences. To make its
fulfilment possible, he changes former arrangements, permitting
what had been forbidden, and prohibiting what had been allowed;
in almost every case this motive lies at the foundation of all his
other innovations. This is seen, for example, when he permits
slaying without sacrificing, and that too anywhere; when, in order
not to abolish the right of asylum (Exodus xxi.13, 14; 1Kings ii.
28) along with the altars, he appoints special cities of refuge for
the innocent who are pursued by the avenger of blood; when he
provides for the priests of the suppressed sanctuaries,
recommending the provincials to take them along with them on their
sacrificial pilgrimages, and giving them the right to officiate in
the temple at Jerusalem just like the hereditarily permanent
clergy there. In other respects also the dominance of the same
point of view is seen: for example, it is chiefly from regard to
it that the old ordinances and customs relating to the religious
dues and the festivals are set forth in the form which they must
henceforth assume. A law so living, which stands at every point
in immediate contact with reality, which is at war with
traditionary custom, and which proceeds with constant reference to
the demands of practical life, is no mere velleity, no mere cobweb
of an idle brain, but has as certainly arisen out of historical
occasions as it is designed to operate powerfully on the course of
the subsequent history. A judgment pronounced in accordance with
the facts can therefore assign to it an historical place only
within that movement of reformation which was brought to a
victorious issue by King Josiah.
I.II.3. It is often supposed that the Priestly Code is somewhat
indifferent to the question of the one sanctuary, neither
permitting multiplicity of sacrificial centres nor laying stress
upon the unity, and that on account of this attitude it must be
assigned to an earlier date than Deuteronomy. /1/
**************************************
1. De Wette, in the fifth place of his Habilitationsschrift ueber
das Deuteronomium (Jena, 1805): "De hoc unico cultus sacri loco...
priores libri nihil omnino habent. De sacrificiis tantum unice
ante tabernaculum conventus offerendis lex quaedam extat.
Sed in legibus de diebus festis, de primitiis et decimis,
tam saepe repetitis, nihil omnino monitum est de loco unico,
ubi celebrari et offerri debeant " (Opusc. Theol, p. 163-165).
****************************************
Such an idea is, to say the least, in the highest degree superficial.
The assumption that worship is restricted to one single centre
runs everywhere throughout the entire document. To appeal specially,
in proof of the restriction, to Leviticus xvii. or Josh xxii., is
to indicate a complete failure to apprehend the whole tenor
of Exodus xxv.-Leviticus ix. Before so much as a single regulation
having reference to the matter of worship can be given (such is
the meaning of the large section referred to), the one rightful place
wherein to engage in it must be specified. The tabernacle is
not narrative merely, but, like all the narratives in that book,
law as well; it expresses the legal unity of the worship as
an historical fact, which, from the very beginning, ever since
the exodus, has held good in Israel. One God one sanctuary,
that is the idea. With the ordinances of the tabernacle, which form
the sum of the divine revelation on Sinai, the theocracy was founded;
where the one is, there is the other. The description of it, therefore,
stands at the head of the Priestly Code, just as that of the temple
stands at the head of the legislation in Ezekiel. It is the basis
and indispensable foundation, without which all else would merely
float in the air: first must the seat of the Divine Presence on
earth be given before the sacred community can come into life and
the cultus into force. Is it supposes that the tabernacle
tolerates other sanctuaries besides itself? Why then the
encampment of the twelve tribes around it, which has no military,
but a purely religious significance, and derives its whole meaning
from its sacred centre? Whence this concentration of all Israel
into one great congregation [ QHL, (DH ], without its like anywhere
else in the Old Testament? On the contrary, there is no other
place besides this at which God dwells and suffers Himself to be
seen; no place but this alone where man can draw near to Him and
seek His face with offerings and gifts. This view is the axiom
that underlies the whole ritual legislation of the middle part of
the Pentateuch. It is indicated with special clearness by the
LPNY (HL MW(D (before the tabernacle), introduced at every turn
in the ordinances for sacrifice.
What then are we to infer from this as to the historical place of
the Priestly Code, if it be judged necessary to assign it such a
place at all? By all the laws of logic it can no more belong to
the first period than Deuteronomy does. But is it older or
younger than Deuteronomy? In that book the unity of the cultus is
COMMANDED, in the Priestly Code it is PRESUPPOSED. Everywhere it
is tacitly assumed as a fundamental postulate, but nowhere does it
find actual expression; /1/ it is nothing new, but quite a thing
*******************************************
1. Except in Leviticus xvii.; but the small body of legislation
contained in Leviticus xvii-xxvi is the transition from Deuteronomy
to the Priestly Code.
********************************
of course. What follows from this for the question before us?
To my thinking, this:--that the Priestly Code rests
upon the result which is only the aim of Deuteronomy. The latter
is in the midst of movement and conflict: it clearly speaks out
its reforming intention, its opposition to the traditional "what we
do here this day;" the former stands outside of and above the
struggle,--the end has been reached and made a secure possession.
On the basis of the Priestly Code no reformation would ever have
taken place, no Josiah would ever have observed from it that the
actual condition of affairs was perverse and required to be set
right; it proceeds as if everything had been for long in the best
of order. It is only in Deuteronomy, moreover, that one sees to
the root of the matter, and recognises its connection with the
anxiety for a strict monotheism and for the elimination from the
worship of the popular heathenish elements, and thus with a deep
and really worthy aim; in the Priestly Code the reason of the
appointments, in themselves by no means rational, rests upon their
own legitimacy, just as everything that is actual ordinarily seems
natural and in no need of explanation. Nowhere does it become
apparent that the abolition of the Bamoth and Asherim and memorial
stones is the real object contemplated; these institutions are
now almost unknown, and what is really only intelligible as a
negative and polemical ordinance is regarded as full of meaning in
itself.
The idea as idea is older than the idea as history. In
Deuteronomy it appears in its native colours, comes forward with
its aggressive challenge to do battle with the actual. One step
indeed is taken towards investing it with an historical character,
in so far as it is put into the mouth of Moses; but the beginning
thus made keeps within modest limits. Moses only lays down the
law; for its execution he makes no provision as regards his own
time, nor does he demand it for the immediate future. Rather it is
represented as not destined to come into force until the people
shall have concluded the conquest of the country and secured a
settled peace. We have already found reason to surmise that the
reference to "menuha" is intended to defer the date when the Law
shall come into force to the days of David and Solomon (1Kings
viii.16). This is all the more probable inasmuch as there is
required for its fulfilment "the place which Jehovah shall choose,"
by which only the capital of Judah can be meant. Deuteronomy,
therefore, knows nothing of the principle that what ought to be
must actually have been from the beginning. Until the building of
Solomon's temple the unity of worship according to it had,
properly speaking, never had any existence; and, moreover, it is
easy to read between the lines that even after that date it was
more a pious wish than a practical demand. The Priestly Code, on
the other hand, is unable to think of religion without the one
sanctuary, and cannot for a moment imagine Israel without it,
carrying its actual existence back to the very beginning of the
theocracy, and, in accordance with this, completely altering the
ancient history. The temple, the focus to which the worship was
concentrated, and which in reality was not built until Solomon's
time, is by this document regarded as so indispensable, even for
the troubled days of the wanderings before the settlement, that it
is made portable, and in the form of a tabernacle set up in the
very beginning of things. For the truth is, that the tabernacle
is the copy, not the prototype, of the temple at Jerusalem. The
resemblance of the two is indeed unmistakable, /1/
****************************
1. In Wisdom of Solomon ix. 8 the temple is called MIMHMA SKHNHS
HAGIAS. Josephus (Antiquities iii. 6,1) says of the tabernacle,
(H D'OUDEN METAFEROMENOU NAOU DIEFERE.
*******************************
but it is not said in 1Kings vi. that Solomon made use of the old
pattern and ordered his Tyrian workmen to follow it. The posteriority
of the Mosaic structure comes into clearer light from the two following
considerations brought forward by Graf (p. 60 seq.). In the first
place, in the description of the tabernacle mention is repeatedly
made of its south, north, and west side, without any preceding rubric
as to a definite and constantly uniform orientation; the latter is
tacitly taken for granted, being borrowed from that of the temple,
which was a fixed building, and did not change its site. In the
second place, the brazen altar is, strictly speaking, described as
an altar of wood merely plated with brass,--for a fireplace of
very large size, upon which a strong fire continually burns, a
perfectly absurd construction, which is only to be accounted for
by the wish to make the brazen altar which Solomon cast (1Kings
xvi. 14) transportable, by changing its interior into wood. The
main point, however, is this, that the tabernacle of the Priestly
Code in its essential meaning is not a mere provisional shelter for
the ark on the march, but the sole legitimate sanctuary for the
community of the twelve tribes prior to the days of Solomon, and
so in fact a projection of the later temple. How modest, one might
almost say how awkwardly bashful, is the Deuteronomic reference
to the future place which Jehovah is to choose when compared with
this calm matter-of-fact assumption that the necessary centre of
unity of worship was given from the first! In the one case we
have, so to speak, only the idea as it exists in the mind of the
lawgiver, but making no claim to be realised till a much later
date; in the other, the Mosaic idea has acquired also a Mosaic
embodiment, with which it entered the world at the very first.
By the same simple historical method which carries the central
sanctuary back into the period before Solomon does the Priestly
author abolish the other places of worship. His forty-eight
Levitical cities are for the most part demonstrably a
metamorphosis of the old Bamoth to meet the exigencies of the time.
The altar which the tribes eastward of Jordan build (Josh. xxii.)
is erected with no intention that it should be used, but merely in
commemoration of something. Even the pre-Mosaic period is rendered
orthodox in the same fashion. The patriarchs, having no
tabernacle, have no worship at all; according to the Priestly
Code they build no altars, bring no offerings, and scrupulously
abstain from everything by which they might in any way encroach
on the privilege of the one true sanctuary. This manner of shaping
the patriarchal history is only the extreme consequence of the
effort to carry out with uniformity in history the semper
ubique et ab omnibus of the legal unity of worship.
Thus in Deuteronomy the institution is only in its birth-throes,
and has still to struggle for the victory against the praxis of
the present, but in the Priestly Code claims immemorial legitimacy
and strives to bring the past into conformity with itself,
obviously because it already dominates the present; the carrying
back of the new into the olden time always takes place at a later
date than the ushering into existence of the new itself.
Deuteronomy has its position in the very midst of the historical
crisis, and still stands in a close relation with the older period
of worship, the conditions of which it can contest, but is unable
to ignore, and still less to deny. But, on the other hand, the
Priestly Code is hindered by no survival to present times of the
older usage from projecting an image of antiquity such as it must
have been; unhampered by visible relics or living tradition of an
older state, it can idealise the past to its heart's content. Its
place, then, is after Deuteronomy, and in the third post-exilian
period of the history of the cultus, in which, on the one hand,
the unity of the sanctuary was an established fact, contested by
no one and impugned by nothing, and in which, on the other hand,
the natural connection between the present and the past had been so
severed by the exile that there was no obstacle to prevent an
artificial and ideal repristination of the latter.
I.III.
The reverse of this is what is usually held. In Deuteronomy, it
is considered, there occur clear references to the period of the
kings; but the Priestly Code, with its historical
presuppositions, does not fit in with any situation belonging to
that time, and is therefore older. When the cultus rests upon the
temple of Solomon as its foundation, as in Ezekiel, then every one
recognises the later date; but when it is based upon the
tabernacle, the case is regarded as quite different. The great
antiquity of the priestly legislation is proved by relegating it
to an historical sphere, created by itself out of its own legal
premisses, but which is nowhere to be found within, and therefore
must have preceded actual history. Thus (so to speak) it holds
itself up in the air by its own waistband.
I.III.1. It may, however, seem as if hitherto it had only been
asserted that the tabernacle rests on an historical fiction.
In truth it is proved; but yet it may be well to add some things
which have indeed been said long before now, but never as yet
properly laid to heart. The subject of discussion, be it
premised, is the tabernacle of the Priestly Code; for some kind
of tent for the ark there may well have been: in fact, tents were
in Palestine the earliest dwellings of idols (Hos. ix.6), and only
afterwards gave place to fixed houses; and even the Jehovistic
tradition (although not J) knows of a sacred tent /1/
*************************************
1. It is never, however, employed for legislative purposes,
but is simply a shelter for the ark; it stands without the camp,
as the oldest sanctuaries were wont to do outside the cities.
It is kept by Joshua as aedituus, who sleeps in it, as did Samuel
the aedituus for Eli.
****************************************
in connection with the Mosaic camp, and outside it, just as the older
high places generally had open sites without the city. The question
before us has reference exclusively to the particular tent which,
according to Exodus xxv. seq., was erected at the command of God
as the basis of the theocracy, the pre-Solomonic central sanctuary,
which also in outward details was the prototype of the temple.
At the outset its very possibility is doubtful. Very strange is the
contrast between this splendid structure, on which the costliest
material is lavished and wrought in the most advanced style of
Oriental art, and the soil on which it rises, in the wilderness
amongst the native Hebrew nomad tribes, who are represented as
having got it ready offhand, and without external help. The
incompatibility has long been noticed, and gave rise to doubts as
early as the time of Voltaire. These may, however, be left to
themselves; suffice it that Hebrew tradition, even from the time
of the judges and the first kings, for which the Mosaic tabernacle
was strictly speaking intended, knows nothing at all about it.
It appears a bold thing to say so when one sees how much many a
modern author who knows how to make a skilful use of the Book of
Chronicles has to tell about the tabernacle. For in 2 Chron. i.3
seq. we are told that Solomon celebrated his accession to the
throne with a great sacrificial feast at Gibeon, because the
tabernacle and the brazen altar of Moses were there. In like
manner in 1Chron. xxi.29 it is said that David offered sacrifice
indeed on the threshing-floor of Araunah, but that Jehovah's
dwelling-place and the legitimate altar were at that time at
Gibeon; and further (xvi. 39), that Zadok, the legitimate high
priest, officiated there. From these data the Rabbins first, and
in recent times Keil and Movers especially, have constructed a
systematic history of the tabernacle down to the building of the
temple. Under David and Solomon, as long as the ark was on Mount
Zion, the tabernacle was at Gibeon, as is also shown by the fact
that (2Samuel xxi.6, 9) offerings were sacrificed to Jehovah there.
Before that it was at Nob, where ephod and shewbread (1Samuel xxi.)
are mentioned, and still earlier, from Joshua's time onward, it was
at Shiloh. But these were only its permanent sites, apart from
which it was temporarily set up now here, now there, saving by
its rapidity of movement--one might almost say ubiquity--the
unity of the cultus, notwithstanding the variety and great
distances of the places at which that cultus was celebrated. In
every case in which a manifestation of Jehovah and an offering to
Him are spoken of, the tabernacle must be tacitly understood. /1/
************************************
1. Josh. xxiv. 24, 33 (LXX): after the death of Joshua and Eleazar,
LABONTES (OI )UIOI )ISRAHL THN KIBWTON TOU QEOU PERIFEROSAN
)EN )EAUTOIS. After J. Buxtorf and Sal. van Til (Ugol., Thes. viii.),
this theory has been, worked out specially by Movers. See, on the other
hand, De Wette, Beitraege, p. 108 seq., and Vatke, ut supra, p. 316, note.
************************************
The dogmatic character of this way of making history, and the absurd
consequences to which it leads, need not in the meantime be insisted on;
what is of greatest importance is that the point from which it starts
is in the last degree insecure; for the statement of Chronicles that
Solomon offered the offering of his accession upon the altar of
the tabernacle at Gibeon is in contradiction with that of the older
parallel narrative of 1Kings iii.1-4. The latter not only is
silent about the Mosaic tabernacle, which is alleged to have stood
at Gibeon, but expressly says that Solomon offered upon a high
place (as such), and excuses him for this on the plea that at that
time no house to the name of Jehovah had as yet been built. That
the Chronicler draws from this narrative is certain on general
grounds, and is shown particularly by this, that he designates
the tabernacle at Gibeon by the name of Bamah--a contradictio in
adjecto which is only to be explained by the desire to give an
authentic interpretation of "the great Bamah at Gibeon" in 1Kings
iii. Here, as elsewhere, he brings the history into agreement
with the Law: the young and pious Solomon can have offered his
sacrifice only at the legal place which therefore must be that
high place at Gibeon. Along with 2 Chron. i.3 seq. also fall the
two other statements (1Chron. xvi.39, xxi.29 both of which are
dependent on that leading passage, as is clear revealed by the
recurring phrase "the Bamah of Gibeon." The tabernacle does not
elsewhere occur in Chronicles; it has not yet brought its
consequences with it, and not yet permeated the historical view of
the author. He would certainly have experienced some embarrassment
at the question whether it had previously stood at Nob, for he
lays stress upon the connection between the legitimate sanctuary
and the legitimate Zadok-Eleazar priestly family, which it is
indeed possible to assume for Shiloh, but not for Nob. /1/
************************************
1. Of the priests at Nob, Abiathar alone escaped the massacre
(1Samuel. xxii.); Gad therefore was not one of them.
************************************
The fact that Chronicles represents the Israelite history in accordance
with the Priestly Code has had the effect of causing its view
of the history to be involuntarily taken as fundamental, but ought much
rather to have caused it to be left altogether out of account where
the object to ascertain what was the real and genuine tradition.
The Books of Judges and Samuel make mention indeed of many sanctuaries,
but never among them of the tabernacle, the most important of all.
For the single passage where the name Ohel Moed occurs (1Samuel
ii.22 is badly attested, and from its contents open to suspicion. /2/
**************************************
2. The passage does not occur in the LXX, and everywhere else in
1Samueli-iii the sanctuary of Shiloh is called hekal, that is to say,
certainly not a tent.
***************************************
Of the existence of the ark of Jehovah there certainly are distinct traces
towards the end of the period of the judges (compare 1Samuel iv.-vi.)
But is the ark a guarantee of the existence of the tabernacle?
On the contrary its whole history down to the period of its being deposited
in the temple of Solomon is a proof that it was regarded as quite
independent of any tent specially consecrated for its reception.
But this abolishes the notion of the Mosaic tabernacle; for
according to the law, the two things belong necessarily to each
other; the one cannot exist without the other; both are of
equally great importance. The tabernacle must everywhere
accompany the symbol of its presence; the darkness of the holy
of holies is at the same time the life-element of the ark; only
under compulsion of necessity, and even then not except under the
covering of the curtains, does it leave its lodging during a
march, only to return to it again as soon as the new halting-place
is reached. But according to 1Samuel iv. seq., on the other hand,
it is only the ark that goes to the campaign; it alone falls into
the hands of the Philistines. Even in chap. v., where the symbol
of Jehovah is placed in the temple of Dagon at Ashdod, not a word
is said of the tabernacle or of the altar which is necessarily
connected with it; and chap. vi. is equally silent, although
here the enemy plainly gives back the whole of his sacred spoil.
It is assumed that the housing of the ark was left behind at
Shiloh. Very likely; but that was not the Mosaic tabernacle, the
inseparable companion of the ark. In fact, the narrator speaks of
a permanent house at Shiloh with doors and doorposts; that
possibly may be an anachronism /1/ (yet why ?) ;
*****************************************
1. Compare similar passages in Josh. vi.19, 24, ix.27, where the very
anachronism shows that the idea of the tabernacle was unknown
to the narrator. That, moreover. a permanent house did actually exist
then at Shiloh follows from the circumstance that Jeremiah (vii. 12)
speaks of its ruins. For he could not regard any other than a
pre-Solomonic sanctuary as preceding that of Jerusalem; and
besides, there is not the faintest trace of a more important temple
having arisen at Shiloh within the period of the kings.
*****************************************
but so much at least may be inferred from it that he had not any idea
of the tabernacle, which, however, would have had to go with the ark
to the field. If on this one occasion only an illegal exception
to the Law was made, why in that case was not the ark, at least after
its surrender, again restored to the lodging from which, strictly
speaking, it ought never to have been separated at all? Instead of
this it is brought to Bethshemesh, where it causes disaster,
because the people show curiosity about it. Thence it comes to
Kirjathjearim, where it stays for many years in the house of a
private person. From here David causes it to be brought to
Jerusalem,-- one naturally supposes, if one thinks in the lines of
the view given in the Pentateuch and in Chronicles, in order that
it may be at last restored to the tabernacle, to be simultaneously
brought to Jerusalem. But no thought of this, however obvious it
may seem, occurs to the king. In the first instance, his
intention is to have the ark beside himself in the citadel; but he
is terrified out of this, and, at a loss where else to put it, he
at last places it in the house of one of his principal people,
Obed-Edom of Gath. Had he known anything about the tabernacle, had
he had any suspicion that it was standing empty at Gibeon, in the
immediate neighbourhood, he would have been relieved of all
difficulty. But inasmuch as the ark brings blessing to the house
of Obed-Edom,--the ark, be it remembered, in the house of a soldier
and a Philistine, yet bringing down, not wrath, but blessing,--/1/
*********************************************
1. The Chronicle has good reason for making him a Levite. But Gath
without any qualifying epithet, and particularly in connection with David,
is the Philistine Gath, and Obed-Edom belongs to the bodyquard, which
consisted chiefly of foreigners and Philistines. His name,
moreover, is hardly Israelite.
**********************************************
the king is thereby encouraged to persevere after all with his original
proposal, and establish it upon his citadel. And this he does in a tent
he had caused to be made for it (2Samuel vi.17), which tent of David
in Zion continued to be its lodging until the temple was built.
Some mention of the tabernacle, had it existed, would have been
inevitable when the temple took its place. That it did not serve
as the model of the temple has already been said; but it might
have been expected at least that in the account of the building of
the new sanctuary some word might have escaped about the
whereabouts of the old. And this expectation seems to be realised
in 1Kings viii.4, which says that when the temple was finished
there were brought into it, besides the ark, the Ohel Moed and all
the sacred vessels that were therein. Interpreters hesitate as to
whether they ought to understand by the Ohel Moed the tent of the
ark upon Zion, to which alone reference has been made in the
preceding narrative (1Kings i.39, ii.28-30), or whether it is the
Mosaic tent, which, according to Chronicles, was standing at
Gibeon, but of which the Book of Kings tells nothing, and also
knows nothing (iii.2-4). It is probable that the author of viii.4
mixed up both together; but we have to face the following
alternative. Either the statement belongs to the original context
of the narrative in which it occurs, and in that case the Ohel Moed
can only be the tent on Mount Zion, or the Ohel Moed of 1Kings
viii.4 is the Mosaic tabernacle which was removed from Gibeon into
Solomon's temple, and in that case the allegation has no
connection with its context, and does not hang together with the
premisses which that furnishes; in other words, it is the
interpolation of a later hand. The former alternative, though
possible, is improbable, for the name Ohel Moed occurs absolutely
nowhere in the Books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings (apart from the
interpolation in 1Samuel ii.22b), and particularly it is not used
to denote David's tent upon Mount Zion; and, moreover, that tent
had received too little of the consecration of antiquity, and
according to 2Samuel vii. was too insignificant and provisional to
be thought worthy of preservation in the temple. But if the Ohel
Moed is here (what it everywhere else is) the tabernacle, as is
indicated also by the sacred vessels, then the verse is, as has
been said, an interpolation. The motive for such a thing is easily
understood; the same difficulty as that with which we set out
must have made it natural for any Jew who started from the ideas
of the Pentateuch to look for the tabernacle here, and, if he did
not find it, to introduce it. Yet even the interpolation does not
remove the difficulties. Where is the Mosaic altar of
burnt-offering? It was quite as important and holy as the
tabernacle itself; even in Chronicles it is invariably mentioned
expressly in connection with it, and did not deserve to be
permitted to go to ruin at Gibeon, which, from another point of
view, would also have been extremely dangerous to the unity of
the sacrificial worship. Further, if the sacred vessels were
transferred from the tabernacle to the temple, why then was it
that Solomon, according to 1Kings vii., cast a completely new
set? /1/
*************************************
1. The brazen altar cast by Solomon (1Kings viii.64;
2Kings xvi.14, 15) is not now found in the inventory of the temple
furniture in 1Kings vii.; but originally it cannot have been
absent, for it is the most important article. It has therefore
been struck out in order to avoid collision with the brazen altar
of Moses. The deletion is the negative counterpart to the
interpolation of the tabernacle in 1Kings viii.4.
***************************************
The old ones were costly enough, in part even costlier than the new, and,
moreover, had been consecrated by long use. It is clear that
in Solomon's time neither tabernacle, nor holy vessels, nor brazen altar
of Moses had any existence.
But if there was no tabernacle in the time of the last judges and
first kings, as little was it in existence during the whole of the
previous period. This is seen from 2Samuel vii., a section with
whose historicity we have here nothing to do, but which at all
events reflects the view of a pre-exilian author. It is there told
that David, after he had obtained rest from all his enemies,
contemplated building a worthy home for the ark, and expressed his
determination to the prophet Nathan in the words, "I dwell in a
house of cedar, and the ark of God within curtains." According to
vi.17, he can only mean the tent which he had set up, that is to
say, not the Mosaic tabernacle, which, moreover, according to the
description of Exodus xxv. seq., could not appropriately be
contrasted with a timber erection, still less be regarded as a
mean structure or unworthy of the Deity, for in point of
magnificence it at least competed with the temple of Solomon.
Nathan at first approves of the king's intention, but afterwards
discountenances it, saying that at present God does not wish to
have anything different from that which He has hitherto had. "I
have dwelt in no house since the day that I brought the children
of Israel out of Egypt, but have wandered about under tent and
covering." Nathan also, of course, has not in his eye the Mosaic
tabernacle as the present lodging of the ark, but David's tent upon
Zion. Now he does not say that the ark has formerly been always
in the tabernacle, and that its present harbourage is therefore in
the highest degree unlawful, but, on the contrary, that the present
state of matters is the right one,--that until now the ark has
invariably been housed under an equally simple and unpretentious
roof. As David's tent does not date back to the Exodus, Nathan is
necessarily speaking of changing tents and dwellings; the reading
of the parallel passage in 1Chron. xvii.5, therefore, correctly
interprets the sense. There could be no more fundamental
contradiction to the representation contained in the Pentateuch
than that embodied in these words: the ark has not as its
correlate a single definite sacred tent of state, but is quite
indifferent to the shelter it enjoys--has frequently changed its
abode, but never had any particularly fine one. Such has been
the state of matters since the time of Moses.
Such is the position of affairs as regards the tabernacle; if it
is determined that the age of the Priestly Code is to hang by
these threads, I have no objection. The representation of the
tabernacle arose out of the temple of Solomon as its root, in
dependence on the sacred ark, for which there is early testimony,
and which in the time of David, and also before it, was sheltered
by a tent. From the temple it derives at once its inner character
and its central importance for the cultus as well as its external
form.
I.III.2. A peculiar point of view is taken up by Theodor Noldeke. He
grants the premisses that the tabernacle is a fiction, of which the
object is to give pre-existence to the temple and to the unity of
worship, but he denies the conclusion that in that case the
Priestly Code presuppose; the unity of worship as already
existing in its day, and therefore is late, than Deuteronomy.
In his Untersuchungen zur Kritik des Alten Testaments (p. 127 seq.)
he says:--
"A strong tendency towards unity of worship MUST have arisen as
soon as Solomon's temple was built. Over against the splendid
sanctuary with its imageless worship at the centre of the kingdom
of Judah, the older holy places MUST ever have shrunk farther into
the background, and that not merely in the eyes of the people,
but quite specially also in those of the better classes and of
those whose spiritual advancement was greatest (compare Amos iv.
4,viii.14). If even Hezekiah carried out the unification in Judah
with tolerable thoroughness, the effort after it MUST surely have
been of very early date; for the determination violently to
suppress old sacred usages would not have been easily made, unless
this had been long previously demanded by theory. The priests at
Jerusalem MUST very specially at an early date have arrived at
the conception that their temple with the sacred ark and the great
altar was the one true place of worship, and an author has clothed
this very laudable effort on behalf of the purity of religion in
the form of a law, which certainly in its strictness was quite
impracticable (ILeviticus xvii.4 seq.), and which, therefore, was
modified later by the Deuteronomist with a view to practice."
What MUST have happened is of less consequence to know than what
actually took place. Noldeke relies solely upon the statement of
2Kings xviii.4, 22, that Hezekiah abolished the high places and
altars of Jehovah, and said to Judah and Jerusalem, "Before this
altar shall ye worship in Jerusalem." With reference to that
statement doubts have already been raised above. How startling
was the effect produced at a later date by the similar ordinance
of Josiah! Is it likely then that the other, although the
earlier, should have passed off so quietly and have left so little
mark that the reinforcement of it, after an interval of seventy
or eighty years, is not in the least brought into connection with
it, but in every respect figures as a new first step upon a path
until then absolutely untrodden? Note too how casual is the
allusion to a matter which is elsewhere the chief and most favoured
theme of the Book of Kings! And there is besides all this the
serious difficulty, also already referred to above, that the man
from whom Hezekiah must, from the nature of the case, have received
the impulse to his reformatory movement, the prophet Isaiah, in
one of his latest discourses expressly insists on a cleansing
merely of the local sanctuaries from molten and graven images,
that is to say, does not desire their complete removal. So much at
least is certain that, if the alleged fact at present under
discussion amounts to anything at all /1/
**********************************
1. Little importance is to be attached to 2Kings xviii.22.
The narrative of the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem is not a contemporary
one, as appears generally from the entirely indefinite character of
the statements about the sudden withdrawal of the Assyrians and its causes,
and particularly from xix.7, 36, 37. For in this passage the meaning
certainly is that Sennacherib was assassinated soon after the unsuccessful
expedition of 701, but in point of fact he actually reigned until
684 or 681 (Smith, Assyrian Eponym Canon, pp. 90, 170). Thus the
narrator writes not twenty years merely after the event, but so
long after it as to make possible the elision of those twenty
years: probably he is already under the influence of
Deuteronomy. 2Kings xviii.4 is certainly of greater weight than
2Kings xviii.22. But although highly authentic statements have
been preserved to us in the epitome of the Book of Kings, they
have all, nevertheless, been subjected not merely to the
selection, but also to the revision of the Deuteronomic redactor,
and it may very well be that the author thought himself
justified in giving his subject a generalised treatment, according
to which the cleansing (of the temple at Jerusalem in the first
instance) from idols, urged by Isaiah and carried out by
Hezekiah, was changed into an abolition of the Bamoth with their
Macceboth and Asherim. It is well known how indifferent later
writers are to distinctions of time and degree in the heresy of
unlawful worship; they always go at once to the completed
product. But in actual experience the reformation was doubtless
accomplished step by step. At first we have in Hosea and Isaiah
the polemic directed against molten and graven images, then in
Jeremiah that against wood and stone, i.e., against Macceboth and
Asherim; the movement originated with the prophets, and the chief,
or rather the only, weight is to be attached to their authentic
testimony.
*************************************
Hezekiah only made a feeble and wholly ineffectual attempt in this
direction, and by no means "carried out the unification in Judah with
tolerable thoroughness." At the same time, one might concede even
this last point, and yet not give any ground for the theory at
which Noldeke wishes to arrive.
For his assumption is that the effort after unity had its old and
original seat precisely in the priestly circles of Jerusalem. If
the Priestly Code is older than Deuteronomy, then of course the
prophetic agitation for reform of worship in which Deuteronomy had
its origin must have been only the repetition of an older
priestly movement in the same direction. But of the latter we
hear not a single word, while we can follow the course of the
former fairly well from its beginnings in thought down to its
issue in a practical result. It was Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah who
introduced the movement against the old popular worship of the high
places; in doing so they are not in the least actuated by a
deep-rooted preference for the temple of Jerusalem, but by ethical
motives, which manifest themselves in them for the first time in
history, and which we can see springing up in them before our very
eyes: their utterances, though historically occasioned by the
sanctuaries of northern Israel, are quite general, and are directed
against the cultus as a whole. Of the influence of a point of view
even remotely akin to the priestly position that worship in this
or that special place is of more value than anywhere else, and on
that account alone deserves to be preserved, no trace is to be
found in them; their polemic is a purely prophetic one, i.e.,
individual, "theopneust" in the sense that it is independent of all
traditional and preconceived human opinions. But the subsequent
development is dependent upon this absolutely original
commencement, and has its issue, not in the Priestly Code, but in
Deuteronomy, a book that, with all reasonable regard for the
priests (though not more for those of Jerusalem than for the
others), still does not belie its prophetic origin, and above all
things is absolutely free from all and every hierocratic
tendency. And finally, it was Deuteronomy that brought about the
historical result of Josiah's reformation. Thus the whole
historical movement now under our consideration, so far as it was
effective and thereby has come to our knowledge, is in its origin
and essence prophetic, even if latterly it may have been aided by
priestly influences; and it not merely can, but must be
understood from itself. Any older or independent contemporary
priestly movement in the same direction remained at least entirely
without result, and so also has left no witnesses to itself.
Perhaps it occurs to us that the priests of Jerusalem must after
all have been the first to catch sight of the goal, the attainment
of which afterwards brought so great advantage to themselves, but
it does not appear that they were so clever beforehand as we are
after the event. At least there are no other grounds for the
hypothesis of a long previously latent tendency towards
centralisation on the part of the Jerusalem priesthood beyond the
presumption that the Priestiy Code must chronologically precede,
not Deuteronomy merely, but also the prophets. For the sake of
this presumption there is constructed a purely abstract (and as
such perfectly irrefragable) possibility that furnishes a door of
escape from the historical probability, which nevertheless it is
impossible to evade.
How absolutely unknown the Priestly Code continued to be even
down to the middle of the exile can be seen from the Books of
Kings, which cannot have received their present shape earlier than
the death of Nebuchadnezzar. The redactor, who cites the
Deuteronomic law and constantly forms his judgment in accordance
with it, considered (as we have learned from 1Kings iii.2) that
the Bamoth were permissible prior to the building of Solomon's
temple; the tabernacle therefore did not exist for him. Jeremiah,
who flourished about a generation earlier, is equally ignorant of
it, but--on account of the ark, though not necessarily in
agreement with traditional opinion--regards the house of God at
Shiloh (whose ruins, it would seem, were at that time still
visible) as the forerunner of the temple of Jerusalem, and in this
he is followed by the anonymous prophecy of 1Samuel ii.27-36, the
comparatively recent date of which appears from the language
(ii.33), and from the circumstance that it anticipates the
following threatening in iii. In all these writers, and still more
in the case of the Deuteronomist himself, who in xii. actually
makes the unity of the cultus dependent on the previous choice of
Jerusalem, it is an exceedingly remarkable thing that, if the
Priestly Code had been then already a long time in existence,
they should have been ignorant of a book so important and so
profound in its practical bearings. In ancient Hebrew literature
such an oversight could not be made so easily as, in similar
circumstances, with the literature of the present day. And how
comes it to pass that in the Book of Chronicles, dating from the
third century, the Priestly Code suddenly ceases to be, to all
outward seeming, dead, but asserts its influence everywhere over
the narrative in only too active and unmistakable a way? To
these difficulties Noldeke is unreasonably indifferent. He seems
to be of the opinion that the post-exilian time would not have
ventured to take in hand so thoroughgoing an alteration, or rather
reconstruction, of tradition as is implied in antedating the temple
of Solomon by means of the tabernacle. /1/
************************************************
1. Jahrb. fuer prot. Theol., i. p. 352: "And now let me ask whether
a document of this kind presenting, as it does, a picture of the
history, land distribution, and sacrificial rites of Israel, as a whole,
which in so many particulars departs from the actual truth, can belong
to a time in which Israel clung to what was traditional with such timid
anxiety?"
*************************************************
But it is, on the contrary, precisely the mark which distinguished
the post-exile writers that they treat in the freest possible manner,
in accordance with their own ideas, the institutions of the bygone
past, with which their time was no longer connected by any living
bond. For what reason does Chronicles stand in the canon at all,
if not in order to teach us this?
But when Noldeke excuses the ignorance with regard to the
tabernacle on the plea that it is a mere creature of the brain, /2/
*************************************
1. Unters., p. 130: "It must always be remembered that the author
in his statements, as in his laws, does not depict actual relations,
but in the first instance his own theories and ideals. Hence the
glorification of the tabernacle," &c. &c.
*************************************
he for the moment forgets that there underlies this creation the very
real idea of unity of worship, for the sake of which it would
surely have been very welcome, to the Deuteronomist, for example,
even as a mere idea. It is only the embodiment of the tabernacle
that is fancy; the idea of it springs from the ground of history,
and it is by its idea that it is to be apprehended. And when
Noldeke finally urges in this connection as a plea for the
priority of the Priestly Code that, in spite of the limitation of
sacrifice to a single locality, it nevertheless maintains the old
provision that every act of killing must be a sacrifice, while
Deuteronomy, going a step farther, departs from this, here also his
argument breaks down.
For we read in Leviticus xvii., "What man soever there be of the house
of Israel that killeth an ox or sheep or goat in the camp, or out
of the camp, and bringeth it not to the door of the tabernacle, to
offer them as an offering unto the Lord before the tabernacle of
the Lord, blood shall be imputed unto that man: he hath shed
blood, and that man shall be cut off from among his people: to the
end that the children of Israel may bring their sacrifices which
they offer in the open field, even that they may bring them to
the Lord, to the door of the tabernacle, to the priest, and offer
them for peace-offerings unto the Lord....And they shall no more
offer sacrifices unto devils, after whom they have gone a
whoring."
The intention of this prescription is simply and solely
to secure the exclusive legitimation of the one lawful place of
sacrifice; it is only for this, obviously, that the profane
slaughtering outside of Jerusalem, which Deuteronomy had
permitted, is forbidden. Plainly the common man did not quite
understand the newly drawn and previously quite unknown
distinction between the religious and the profane act, and when he
slaughtered at home (as he was entitled to do), he in doing so
still observed, half-unconsciously perhaps, the old sacred
sacrificial ritual. From this arose the danger of a multiplicity
of altars again furtively creeping in, and such a danger is met,
in an utterly impracticable way indeed, in Leviticus xvii. And it is
worth noticing how much this law, which, for the rest, is based
upon the Book of Deuteronomy, has grown in the narrowness of its
legitimistic mode of viewing things. Deuteronomy thoroughly
recognises that offerings, even though offered outside of
Jerusalem, are still offered to Jehovah; for the author of Leviticus
xvii. this is an impossible Idea, and he regards such offerings
simply as made to devils. /1/
*************************************
1. With reference to these rural demons, compare my note in
Vakidi's Maghazi (Berlin, 1882), p. 113. It is somewhat similar,
though not quite the same thing, when the Moslems say that the old
Arabs dedicated their worship to the Jinns; and other instances
may be compared in which divinities have been degraded to demons.
************************************
I refuse to believe that any such thing could have been possible
for one who lived before the Deuteronomic reformation, or even
under the old conditions that were in existence immediately
before the exile.
Leviticus xvii., moreover, belongs confessedly to a peculiar little
collection of laws, which has indeed been taken up into the
Priestly Code, but which in many respects disagrees with it, and
particularly in respect of this prohibition of profane
slaughterings. With reference to the Priestly Code as a whole,
Noldeke's assertion is quite off the mark. The code, on the
contrary, already allows slaughter without sacrifice in the
precepts of Noah, which are valid not merely for all the world,
but also for the Jews. Farther on this permission is not
expressly repeated indeed, but it is regarded as a thing of
course. This alone can account for the fact that the
thank-offering is treated so entirely as a subordinate affair and
the sacrificial meal almost ignored, while in Leviticus vii.22-27
rules are even given for procedure in the slaughter of such animals
as are not sacrificed. /2/
***********************************
2. That Leviticus vii.22-27 is not a repetition of the old and fuller
regulations about the thank-offering, but an appendix containing
new ones relating to slaughtering, is clear from "the beast of
which men offer an offering unto the Lord" (ver. 25), and "in all
your dwellings" (ver. z6), as well as from the praxis of Judaism.
**********************************
Here accordingly is another instance of what we have already so often
observed: what is brought forward in Deuteronomy as an innovation
is assumed in the Priestly Code to be an ancient custom dating
as far back as to Noah. And therefore the latter code is a growth
of the soil that has been prepared by means of the former.
CHAPTER II. SACRIFICE.
With the Hebrews, as with the whole ancient world, sacrifice
constituted the main part of worship. The question is whether
their worship did not also in this most important respect pass
through a history the stages of which are reflected in the
Pentateuch. From the results already reached this must be
regarded at the outset as probable, but the sources of information
accessible to us seem hardly sufficient to enable us actually to
follow the process, or even so much as definitely to fix its two
termini.
II.I.1. The Priestly Code alone occupies itself much with the
subject; it gives a minute classification of the various kinds of
offerings, and a description of the procedure to be followed in the
case of each. In this way it furnishes also the normative scheme
for modern accounts of the matter, into which all the other casual
notices of the Old Testament on the subject must be made to fit as
best they can. This point accordingly presents us with an
important feature by which the character of the book can be
determined. In it the sacrificial ritual is a constituent, and
indeed a very essential element, of the Mosaic legislation: that
ritual is not represented as ancient use handed down to the
Israelites by living practice from ancestral times: it was Moses
who gave them the theory of it--a very elaborate one too--and
he himself received his instruction from God (Exodus xxv. seq.;
Leviticus i. seq.). An altogether disproportionate emphasis is
accordingly laid upon the technique of sacrifice corresponding to
the theory, alike upon the when, the where, and the by whom, and
also in a very special manner upon the how. It is from these that
the sacrifice obtains its specific value; one could almost suppose
that even if it were offered to another God, it would by means of
the legitimate rite alone be at once made essentially Jehovistic.
The cultus of Israel is essentially distinguished from all others
by its form, the distinctive and constitutive mark of the holy
community. With it the theocracy begins and it with the
theocracy; the latter is nothing more than the institution for the
purpose of carrying on the cultus after the manner ordained by
God. For this reason also the ritual, which appears to concern the
priests only, finds its place in a law-book intended for the whole
community; in order to participate in the life of the theocracy,
all must of course, have clear knowledge of its essential nature,
and in this the theory of sacrifice holds a first place.
The Jehovistic portion of the Pentateuch also knows of no other
kind of divine worship besides the sacrificial, and does not attach
to it less importance than the Priestly Code. But we do not find
many traces of the view that the sacrificial system of Israel is
distinguished from all others by a special form revealed to Moses,
which makes it the [sic] alone legitimate. Sacrifice is
sacrifice: when offered to Baal, it is heathenish; when offered
to Jehovah, it is Israelite. In the Book of the Covenant and in
both Decalogues it is enjoined before everything to serve no other
God besides Jehovah, but also at the proper season to offer
firstlings and gifts to Him. Negative determinations, for the most
part directed against one heathenish peculiarity or another, occur
but there are no positive ordinances relating to the ritual. How
one is to set about offering sacrifice is taken for granted as
already known, and nowhere figures as an affair for the
legislation, which, on the contrary, occupies itself with quite
other things. What the Book of the Covenant and the Decalogue
leave still perhaps doubtful becomes abundantly clear from the
Jehovistic narrative. The narrative has much more to say about
sacrifice than the incorporated law books, and this may be
regarded as characteristic; in the Priestly Code it is quite the
other way. But what is specially important is that, according to
the Jehovistic history, the praxis of sacrifice, and that too of
the regular and God-pleasing sort, extends far beyond the Mosaic
legislation, and, strictly speaking, is as old as the world
itself. A sacrificial feast which the Hebrews wish to celebrate in
the wilderness is the occasion of the Exodus; Moses already
builds an altar at Rephidim (Exodus xvii.), and, still before the
ratification of the covenant on Sinai, a solemn meal in the
presence of Jehovah is set on foot on occasion of Jethro's visit
(Exodus xviii.). But the custom is much older still; it was
known and practiced by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Noah, the
father of all mankind, built the first altar after the Flood, and
long before him Cain and Abel sacrificed in the same way as was
usual in Palestine thousands of years afterwards. Balaam the
Aramaean understands just as well as any Israelite how to offer
sacrifices to Jehovah that do not fail of their effect. All this
brings out, with as much clearness as could be desired, that
sacrifice is a very ancient and quite universal mode of honouring
the Deity, and that Israelite sacrifice is distinguished not by
the manner in which, but by the being to whom, it is offered, in
being offered to the God of Israel. According to this
representation of the matter, Moses left the procedure in
sacrifice, as he left the procedure in prayer, to be regulated by
the traditional praxis; if there was any definite origination of
the cultus of Israel, the patriarchs must be thought of, but even
they were not the discoverers of the ritual; they were merely
the founders of those holy places at which the Israelites
dedicated gifts to Jehovah, a usage which was common to the whole
world. The contrast with the Priestly Code is extremely
striking, for it is well known that the latter work makes mention
of no sacrificial act prior to the time of Moses, neither in
Genesis nor in Exodus, although from the time of Noah slaughtering
is permitted. The offering of a sacrifice of sheep and oxen as the
occasion of the exodus is omitted, and in place of the sacrifice of
the firstlings we have the paschal lamb, which is slaughtered and
eaten without altar, without priest, and not in the presence of
Jehovah. /1/
*******************************************
1. With regard to sacrifice, Deuteronomy still occupies the same
standpoint as JE.
*******************************************
The belief that the cultus goes back to pre-Mosaic usage is
unquestionably more natural than the belief that it is the main
element of the Sinaitic legislation; the thought would be a
strange one that God should suddenly have revealed, or Moses
discovered and introduced, the proper sacrificial ritual. At the
same time this does not necessitate the conclusion that the
Priestly Code is later than the Jehovist. Nor does this follow
from the very elaborately-developed technique of the agenda, for
elaborate ritual may have existed in the great sanctuaries at a
very early period,--though that, indeed, would not prove it to be
genuinely Mosaic. On the other hand, it is certainly a
consideration deserving of great weight that the representation of
the exclusive legitimacy of so definite a sacrificial ritual,
treated in the Priestly Code as the only possible one in Israel,
is one which can have arisen only as a consequence of the
centralisation of the cultus at Jerusalem. Yet by urging this the
decision of the question at present before us would only be
referred back to the result already arrived at in the preceding
chapter, and it is much to be desired that it should be solved
independently, so as not to throw too much weight upon a single
support.
II.I.2. In this case also the elements of a decision can only be
obtained from the historical documents dating from the pre-exilic
time,--the Books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings on the one hand, and
the writings of the prophets on the other. As regards those of the
first class, they represent the cultus and sacrifice on all
occasions as occupying a large place in the life of the nation and
of the individual. But, although it would be wrong to say that
absolutely no weight is attached to the RITE, it is certainly not
the fact that the main stress is laid upon it; the antithesis is
not between RITE and NON-RITE, but between sacrifice TO JEHOVAH and
sacrifice TO STRANGE GODS, the reverse of what we find in the
Priestly Code. Alongside of splendid sacrifices, such as those of
the kings, presumably offered in accordance with all the rules of
priestly skill, there occur others also of the simplest and most
primitive type, as, for example, those of Saul (1Samuel xiv.35) and
Elisha (1Kings xix.2I); both kinds are proper if only they be
dedicated to the proper deity. Apart from the exilian redaction of
the Book of Kings, which reckons the cultus outside of Jerusalem as
heretical, it is nowhere represented that a sacrifice could be
dedicated to the God of Israel, and yet be illegitimate. Naaman
(2Kings v. 17), it is to be supposed, followed his native Syrian
ritual, but this does not in the least impair the acceptability of
his offering. For reasons easily explained, it is seldom that an
occasion arises to describe the ritual, but when such a description
is given it is only with violence that it can be forced into
accordance with the formula of the law. Most striking of all is
the procedure of Gideon in Judges vi.19-21, in which it is manifest
that the procedure still usual at Ophrah in the time of the
narrator is also set forth. Gideon boils a he-goat and bakes in
the ashes cakes of unleavened bread, places upon the bread the
flesh in a basket and the broth in a pot, and then the meal thus
prepared is burnt in the altar flame. It is possible that
instances may have also occurred in which the rule of the
Pentateuch is followed, but the important point is that the
distinction between legitimate and heretical is altogether wanting.
When the Book of Chronicles is compared the difference is at once
perceived.
The impression derived from the historical books is confirmed by
the prophets. It is true that in their polemic against confounding
worship with religion they reveal the fact that in their day the
cultus was carried on with the utmost zeal and splendour, and was
held in the highest estimation. But this estimation does not rest
upon the opinion that the cultus, as regards its matter, goes back
to Moses or to Jehovah Himself, gives to the theocracy its
distinctive character, and even constitutes the supernatural
priesthood of Israel among the nations, but simply upon the belief
that Jehovah must be honoured by His dependents, just as other
gods are by their subjects, by means of offerings and gifts as
being the natural and (like prayer) universally current
expressions of religious homage. The larger the quantity, and the
finer the quality, so much the better; but that the merit arising
from the presentation depends upon strict observance of etiquette
regarded as Jehovah's law is not suggested. Thus it is that the
prophets are able to ask whether then Jehovah has commanded His
people to tax their energies with such exertions? the fact
presupposed being that no such command exists, and that no one
knows anything at all about a ritual Torah. Amos, the leader of
the chorus, says (iv.4 seq.),
"Come to Bethel to sin, to Gilgal to sin yet more, and bring your
sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three days, for so ye
like, ye children of Israel."
In passing sentence of rejection upon the value of the cultus he
is in opposition to the faith of his time; but if the opinion had
been a current one that precisely the cultus was what Jehovah had
instituted in Israel, he would not have been able to say, "For so
ye like." "Ye," not Jehovah; it is an idle and arbitrary worship.
He expresses himself still more clearly in v.21 seq.
"I hate, I despise your feasts, and I smell not on your holy days;
though ye offer me burnt-offerings and your gifts, I will not accept
them; neither do I regard your thank-offerings of fatted calves.
Away from me with the noise of thy songs, the melody of thy viols
I will not hear; but let judgment roll on like waters, and
righteousness like a mighty stream. Did ye offer unto me
sacrifices and gifts in the wilderness the forty years, O house
of Israel?"
In asking this last question Amos has not the slightest fear
of raising any controversy; on the contrary, he is following
the generally received belief. His polemic is directed against
the praxis of his contemporaries, but here he rests it upon a
theoretical foundation in which they are at one with him,--on
this, namely, that the sacrificial worship is not of Mosaic origin.
Lastly, if ii.4 be genuine, it teaches the same lesson. By the
Law of Jehovah which the people of Judah have despised it is
impossible that Amos can have understood anything in the remotest
degree resembling a ritual legislation. Are we to take it then
that he formed his own special private notion of the Torah? How in
that case would it have been possible for him to make himself
understood by the people, or to exercise influence over them? Of
all unlikely suppositions, at all events it is the least likely
that the herdsman of Tekoah, under the influence of prophetic
tradition (which in fact he so earnestly disclaims), should have
taken the Torah for something quite different from what it actually
was.
Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah are in agreement with Amos. The first
mentioned complains bitterly (iv.6 seq.) that the priests
cultivate the system of sacrifices instead of the Torah. The
Torah, committed by Jehovah to their order, lays it on them as
their vocation to diffuse the knowledge of God in Israel,--the
knowledge that He seeks truthfulness and love, justice and
considerateness, and no gifts; but they, on the contrary, in a
spirit of base self-seeking, foster the tendency of the nation
towards cultus, in their superstitions over-estimate of which lies
their sin and their ruin.
"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; ye yourselves
(ye priests!) reject knowledge, and I too will reject you
that ye shall not be priests unto me; seeing ye have forgotten
the law of your God, so will I also forget you. The more they are,
the more they sin against me; their glory they barter for shame.
They eat the sin of my people, and they set their heart on their
iniquity."
From this we see how idle it is to believe that the prophets
opposed "the Law;" they defend the priestly Torah, which, however,
has nothing to do with cultus, but only with justice and morality.
In another passage (viii.11 seq.) we read,
"Ephraim has built for himself many altars, to sin; the altars
are there for him, to sin. How many soever my instructions
(torothai) may be, they are counted those of a stranger."
This text has had the unmerited misfortune of having been forced
to do service as a proof that Hosea knew of copious writings
similar in contents to our Pentateuch. All that can be drawn
from the contrast "instead of following my instructions they offer
sacrifice" (for that is the meaning of the passage) is that the prophet
had never once dreamed of the possibility of cultus being made
the subject of Jehovah's directions. In Isaiah's discourses
the well-known passage of the first chapter belongs to this connection:
"To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me?
saith the Lord. I am weary with the burnt-offerings of rams
and the fat of fed beasts, and I delight not in the blood of bullocks
and of lambs and of he-goats. When ye come to look upon my face,
who hath required this at your hands?--to trample my courts!"
This expression has long been a source of trouble, and certainly
the prophet could not possibly have uttered it if the sacrificial
worship had, according to any tradition whatever, passed for being
specifically Mosaic. Isaiah uses the word Torah to denote not
the priestly but the prophetical instruction (i.10, ii.3, v.24,
viii.16, 20, xxx.9); as both have a common source and Jehovah is
the proper instructor (xxx.20), this is easily explicable, and is
moreover full of instruction as regards the idea involved;
the contents of the Priestly Code fit badly in with the Torah of i.10.
Lastly, Micah's answer to the people's question, how a return of
the favour of an angry God is to be secured, is of conspicuous
significance (vi.6 seq.):
"Shall I come before Him with burnt-offerings with calves of a year old?
Is the Lord pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of
rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression,
the fruit of my body as atonement for my soul?--It hath been
told thee, O man, what is good, and what Jehovah requireth of thee.
Nay, it is to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly
before thy God."
Although the blunt statement of the contrast between cultus
and religion is peculiarly prophetic, Micah can still take
his stand upon this, "It hath been told thee, O man, what Jehovah
requires." It is no new matter, but a thing well known,
that sacrifices are not what the Torah of the Lord contains.
That we have not inferred too much from these utterances of the
older prophets is clear from the way in which they are taken up
and carried on by Jeremiah, who lived shortly before the
Babylonian exile. Just as in vi.19 seq. he opposes the Torah to
the cultus, so in vii.11 seq. he thus expresses himself:
"Add your burnt-offerings to your sacrifices, and eat flesh!
For I said nought unto your fathers, and commanded them nought,
in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning
burnt-offerings or sacrifices. But this thing commanded I them:
hearken to my voice, and I will be your God, and ye shall be my
people, and walk ye in the way that I shall always teach you, that
it may be well with you."
The view indeed, that the prophets (who, from the connection,
are the ever-living voice to which Israel is to hearken) are
the proper soul of the theocracy, the organ by which Jehovah
influences and rules it, has no claim to immemorial antiquity.
But no stress lies upon the positive element here;
enough that at all events Jeremiah is unacquainted with the Mosaic
legislation as it is contained in the Priestly Code. His ignoring
of it is not intentional, for he is far from hating the cultus
(xvii.26). But, as priest and prophet, staying continually in
the temple at Jerusalem, he must have known it, if it had existed
and actually been codified. The fact is one which it is difficult
to get over.
Thus the historical witnesses, particularly the prophets, decide
the matter in favour of the Jehovistic tradition. According to the
universal opinion of the pre-exilic period, the cultus is indeed of
very old and (to the people) very sacred usage, but not a Mosaic
institution; the ritual is not the main thing in it, and is in no
sense the subject with which the Torah deals. /1/
*********************************
1. That the priests were not mere teachers of law and morals,
but also gave ritual instruction (e.g, regarding cleanness
and uncleanness), is of course not denied by this. All that is
asserted is that in pre-exilian antiquity the priests' own praxis
(at the altar) never constituted the contents of the Torah,
but that their Torah always consisted of instructions to the laity.
The distinction is easily intelligible to those who choose
to understand it.
********************************
In other words, no trace can be found of acquaintance
with the Priestly Code, but, on the other hand, very clear
indications of ignorance of its contents.
II.I.3. In this matter the transition from the pre-exilic to the
post-exilic period is effected, not by Deuteronomy, but by
Ezekiel the priest in prophet's mantle, who was one of the first to
be carried into exile. He stands in striking contrast with his
elder contemporary Jeremiah. In the picture of Israel's future
which he drew in B.C. 573 (chaps. xl.-xlviii.), in which
fantastic hopes are indeed built upon Jehovah, but no impossible
demand made of man, the temple and cultus hold a central place.
Whence this sudden change? Perhaps because now the Priestly Code
has suddenly awakened to life after its long trance, and become
the inspiration of Ezekiel? The explanation is certainly not to
be sought in any such occurrence, but simply in the historical
circumstances. So long as the sacrificial worship remained in
actual use, it was zealously carried on, but people did not
concern themselves with it theoretically, and had not the least
occasion for reducing it to a code. But once the temple was in
ruins, the cultus at an end, its PERSONNEL out of employment, it is
easy to understand how the sacred praxis should have become a
matter of theory and writing, so that it might not altogether
perish, and how an exiled priest should have begun to paint the
picture of it as he carried it in his memory, and to publish it as
a programme for the future restoration of the theocracy. Nor is
there any difficulty if arrangements, which as long as they
were actually in force were simply regarded as natural, were seen
after their abolition in a transfiguring light, and from the study
devoted to them gained artificially a still higher value. These
historical conditions supplied by the exile sufffice to make clear
the transition from Jeremiah to Ezekiel, and the genesis of Ezekiel
xl.-xlviii. The co-operation of the Priestly Code is here not
merely unnecessary, it would be absolutely disconcerting.
Ezekiel's departure from the ritual of the Pentateuch cannot be
explained as intentional alterations of the original; they are
too casual and insignificant. The prophet, moreover, has the
rights of authorship as regards the end of his book as well as for
the rest of it; he has also his right to his picture of the future
as the earlier prophets had to theirs. And finally, let its due
weight be given to the simple fact that an exiled priest saw
occasion to draft such a sketch of the temple worship. What need
would there have been for it, if the realised picture,
corresponding completely to his views, had actually existed, and,
being already written in a book, wholly obviated any danger lest
the cultus should become extinct through the mere fact of its
temporary cessation?
Here again a way of escape is open by assuming a lifeless
existence of the law down to Ezra's time. But if this is done it
is unallowable to date that existence, not from Moses, but from
some other intermediate point in the history of Israel. Moreover,
the assumption of a codification either as preceding all praxis,
or as alongside and independent of it, is precisely in the case of
sacrificial ritual one of enormous difficulty, for it is obvious
that such a codification can only be the final result of an old
and highly developed use, and not the invention of an idle brain.
This consideration also makes retreat into the theory of an
illegal praxis impossible, and renders the legitimacy of the
actually subsisting indisputable.
II.II.
At all times, then, the sacrificial worship of Israel existed, and
had great importance attached to it, but in the earlier period it
rested upon custom, inherited from the fathers, in the post-exilian
on the law of Jehovah, given through Moses. At first it was naive,
and what was chiefly considered was the quantity and quality of
the gifts; afterwards it became legal,--the scrupulous fulfilment
of the law, that is, of the prescribed ritual, was what was looked
to before everything. Was there then, apart from this, strictly
speaking, no material difference? To answer this question our
researches must be carried further afield, after some preliminary
observations have been made in order to fix our position.
II.II.1. In the Pentateuch the sacrificial ritual is indeed copiously
described, but nowhere in the Old Testament is its significance
formally explained; this is treated as on the whole self-evident
and familiar to every one. The general notion of a sacrifice is
in the Priestly Code that of _qorban_, in the rest of the Old
Testament that of _minha_, /1/ ie., "gift;"
***************************************
1. Genesis iv. 3-5, Numbers xvi. 15; 1Samuel ii. 17, 29, xxvi. 19;
Isaiah i. 13; Malachi i. 10-13, ii. 12, 13, iii. 3, 4.
In the Priestly Code _minha_ is exclusively a terminus technicus
for the meal-offering. The general name in the LXX and in the
New Testament is DWRON (Matthew v. 23-24, viii. 4, xv. 5,
xxiii. 18, 19). Compare Spencer, "De ratione et origine
sacrificiorum" (De Legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus, iii.2), by far
the best thing that has ever been written on the subject.
***************************************
the corresponding verbs are _haqrib_ and _haggish_, i.e.,
"to bring near." Both nouns and both verbs are used originally
for the offering of a present to the king (or the nobles) to do
him homage, to make him gracious, to support a petition
(Judges iii. 17 seq.; 1Samuel x. 27; 1Kings v. 1
[A.V. iv.21]), and from this are employed with reference to the
highest King (Malachi i.8).
DWRA QEOUS PEIQAI, DWR' )AIDOIOUS BASILHAS
The gift must not be unseasonably or awkwardly thrust upon the
recipient, not when the king's anger is at white heat, and not by
one the sight of whom he hates.
With respect to the matter of it, the idea of a sacrifice is in
itself indifferent, if the thing offered only have value of some
sort, and is the property of the offerer. Under _qorban_ and _minha_
is included also that which the Greeks called _anathema_. The sacred
dues which at a later date fall to the priest were without doubt
originally ordinary offerings, and amongst these are found even
wool and flax (Deut. xviii. 4; Hos. ii. 7, 11 [A.V. 5, 9] ).
But it is quite in harmony with the naivete of antiquity that as
to man so also to God that which is eatable is by preference
offered; in this there was the additional advantage, that what God
had caused to grow was thus rendered back to Him. In doing this,
the regular form observed is that a meal is prepared in honour of
the Deity, of which man partakes as God's guest. Offering without
any qualifying expression always means a meat or drink offering.
On this account the altar is called a table, on this account also
salt goes along with flesh, oil with meal and bread, and wine with
both; and thus also are we to explain why the flesh, according to
rule, is put upon the altar in pieces and (in the earlier period)
boiled, the corn ground or baked. Hence also the name "bread of
Jehovah" for the offering (Leviticus xxi.22). It is of course true
that "in his offering the enlightened Hebrew saw no banquet to
Jehovah:" but we hardly think of taking the enlightened Protestant
as a standard for the original character of Protestantism.
The manner in which the portions pertaining to God are conveyed to
Him varies. The most primitive is the simple "setting in order"
[ (RK, struere] and "pouring out" [#pk, fundere) in the case of the
shewbread and drink offerings; to this a simple eating and
drinking would correspond. But the most usual is burning, or, as
the Hebrews express it, "making a savour" (HQ+YR), to which
corresponds the more delicate form of enjoyment, that of smelling.
Originally, however, it is God Himself who consumes what the flame
consumes. In any case the burning is a means of conveying the
offering, not, as one might perhaps be disposed to infer from the
"sweet savour" (RYX HNYXX Genesis viii.21), a means of preparing it.
For in ancient times the Hebrews did not roast the flesh, but
boiled it; in what is demonstrably the oldest ritual (Judges
vi. 19), the sacrifice also is delivered to the altar flame boiled;
and, moreover, not the flesh only but also the bread and the meal
are burnt.
As regards the distinction between bloodless and bloody
offerings, the latter, it is well known, are preferred in the Old
Testament, but, strictly speaking, the former also have the same
value and the same efficacy. The incense-offering is represented
as a means of propitiation (Leviticus xvi., Numbers xvii. 12
[A.V. xvi. 47] ), so also are the ten thousands of rivers of oil
figuring between the thousands of rams and the human sacrifice in
Micah vi. That the cereal offering is never anything but an
accompaniment of the animal sacrifice is a rule which does not hold,
either in the case of the shewbread or in that of the high priest's
daily minxa (Leviticus vi. 13 [A.V. 20]; Nehemiahx.35). Only the
drink-offering has no independent position, and was not in any way
the importance it had among the Greeks.
When a sacrifice is killed, the offering consists not of the blood
but of the eatable portions of the flesh. Only these can be
designated as the "bread of Jehovah," and, moreover, only the
eatable domestic animals can be presented. At the same time,
however, it is true that in the case of the bloody offerings a new
motive ultimately came to be associated with the original idea of
the gift. The life of which the blood was regarded as the
substance (2Samuel xxiii.17) had for the ancient Semites something
mysterious and divine about it; they felt a certain religious
scruple about destroying it. With them flesh was an uncommon
luxury, and they ate it with quite different feelings from those
with which they partook of fruits or of milk. Thus the act of
killing was not so indifferent or merely preparatory a step as
for example the cleansing and preparing of corn; on the contrary,
the pouring out of blood was ventured upon only in such a way as
to give it back to the Deity, the source of life. In this way, not
by any means every meal indeed, but every slaughtering, came to
be a sacrifice. What was primarily aimed at in it was a mere
restoration of His own to the Deity, but there readily resulted a
combination with the idea of sacrifice, whereby the latter was
itself modified in a peculiar manner. The atoning efficacy of the
gift began to be ascribed mainly to the blood and to the
vicarious value of the life taken away. The outpouring and
sprinkling of blood was in all sacrifices a rite of conspicuous
importance, and even the act of slaughtering in the case of some,
and these the most valued, a holy act.
II.II.2. The features presented by the various literary sources
harmonise with the foregoing sketch. But the Priestly Code
exhibits some peculiarities by which it is distinguished from the
pre-exilian remains in matters sacrificial.
In the first place, it is characterised in the case of bloodless
offerings by a certain refinement of the material. Thus in the
meal-offerings it will have SLT (simila) not QMX (far). In the
whole pre-exilian literature the former is mentioned only three
times altogether, but never in connection with sacrifice, where,
on the contrary, the ordinary meal is used (Judges vi. 19; 1Samuel
i. 24). That this is no mere accident appears on the one hand from
the fact that in the later literature, from Ezekiel onwards, QMX as
sacrificial meal entirely disappears, and SLT invariably take its
place; on the other hand, from this that the LXX (or the Hebrew
text from which that version was taken) is offended by the
illegality of the material in 1Samuel i. 24, and alters the reading
so as to bring it to conformity with the Law. /1/
***************************************
1. Ezekiel xvi. 13, 19, xlvi. 14; I Chronicles ix. 29, xxiii. 22;
Ecclus. xxxv.2, xxxviii. 11, xxxix. 32; Isaiah i. 13 (LXX); lxvi. 3 (LXX).
In the Priestly Code slt occurs more than forty times.
**************************************
So also a striking preference is shown for incense. With every
meal-offering incense is offered upon the altar; in the inner sanctuary
a special mixture of spices is employed, the accurately given recipe
for which is not to be followed for private purposes. The offering
of incense is the privilege of the higher priesthood; in the
ritual of the great Day of Atonement, the sole one in which Aaron
must discharge the duties in person, it occupies a conspicuous
place. It has an altogether dangerous sanctity; Aaron's own sons
died for not having made use of the proper fire. It is the cause
of death and destruction to the Levites of Korah's company who are
not entitled to use it, while immediately afterwards, in the hands
of the legitimate high priest, it becomes the means of appeasing
the anger of Jehovah, and of staying the plague. Now of this
offering, thus invested with such a halo of sanctity, the older
literature of the Jewish Canon, down to Jeremiah and Zephaniah,
knows absolutely nothing. The verb Q++R there used invariably
and exclusively of the BURNING of fat or meal, and thereby making
to God a sweet-smelling savour; it is never used to denote the
OFFERING OF INCENSE, and the substantive Q+RT as a sacrificial
term has the quite general signification of that which is burnt on
the altar. /2/
**************************************
2. The verb is used in _piel_ by the older writers, in _hiphil_
by the Priestly Code (Chronicles), and promiscuously in both forms
during the transition period by the author of the Books of Kings.
This is the case, at least, where the forms can with certainty be
distinguished, namely, in the perfect, imperative, and infinitive;
the distinction between YQ+R and YQ+YR, MQ+R and MQ+YR rests,
as is well known, upon no secure tradition. Compare, for example,
_qatter jaqtirun_, 1Samuel ii. 16; the transcribers and punctuators
under the influence of the Pentateuch preferred the hiphil. In the
Priestly Code (Chronicles) HQ+YR has both meanings alongside of
each other, but when used without a qualifying phrase it generally
means incensing, and when consuming a sacrifice is intended HMZBXH
is usually added, "on the altar," that is, the place on which the
incense-offering strictly so called was NOT offered. The substantive
Q+RT in the sense of "an offering of incense" in which
it occurs exclusively and very frequently in the Priestly
Code, is first found in Ezekiel (viii. 11, xvi. 18, xxiii. 41) and
often afterwards in Chronicles, but in the rest of the Old
Testament only in Proverbs xxvii. 9, but there in a profane sense.
Elsewhere never, not even in passages so late as 1Samuel ii.28; Psalms
lxvi. 15, cxli. 2. In authors of a certainly pre-exilian date the
word occurs only twice, both times in a perfectly general sense.
Isaiah i. 13: "Bring me no more oblations; it is an abominable
incense to me." Deuteronomy xxxiii. 10: "The Levites shall put incense
(i.e.,the fat of thank-offerings) before thee, and whole
burnt-offerings upon thine altar." The name LBNT (frankincense)
first occurs in Jeremiah (vi. 20, xvii. 26, xli. 5); elsewhere only
in the Priestly Code (nine times), in Isaiah xl.-lxvi. (three
times), in Chronicles and Nehemiah (three times), and in Canticles
(three times). Compare Zephaniah iii. 10; 1Kings ix. 25.
************************************
In enumerations where the prophets exhaust everything pertaining to
sacred gifts and liturgic performances, in which, for the sake
of lengthening the catalogue, they do not shrink from repetitions even,
there is not any mention of incense-offerings, neither in Amos
(iv. 4 seq., v. 21 seq.) nor in Isaiah (i. 11 seq.) nor in Micah
(vi. 6 seq.). Shall we suppose that they all of them forget this
subject by mere accident, or that they conspired to ignore it?
If it had really existed, and been of so great consequence, surely
one of them at least would not have failed to speak of it.
The Jehovistic section of the Hexateuch is equally silent, so also
the historical books, except Chronicles, and so the rest of the prophets,
down to Jeremiah, who (vi.20) selects incense as the example of a rare
and far-fetched offering: "To what purpose cometh there to me incense
from Sheba, and the precious cane from a far country?"
Thenceforward it is mentioned in Ezekiel, in Isaiah (xl.-lxvi.),
in Nehemiah, and in Chronicles; the references are continuous. The
introduction of incense is a natural result of increased luxury;
one is tempted to conjecture that its use must have first crept
into the Jehovah worship as an innovation from a more
luxuriously-developed foreign cultus. But the importance which it
has attained in the ritual legislation of the Pentateuch is
manifest above all from this, that it has led to the invention of a
peculiar new and highly sacred piece of furniture, namely, the
golden altar in the inner tabernacle, which is unknown to history,
and which is foreign even to the kernel of the Priestly Code
itself.
We expect to find the altar of incense in Exodus xxv.-xxix., but
find it instead as an appendix at the beginning of Exodus xxx. Why
not until now? why thus separated from the other furnishings of
the inner sanctuary? and not only so, but even after the
ordinances relating to the adornment of the priests, and the
inauguration of the divine service? The reason why the author of
chaps. xxv.-xxix. is thus silent about the altar of incense in
the passage in which the furniture of the tabernacle, consisting of
ark, table, and candlestick, is described, is, that he does not
know of it. There is no other possibility; for he cannot have
forgotten it. /1/
***************************************
1. There is a peculiar perversity in meeting the objection by
alleging other singularities in the ordinance as for example, that
the vessels of the tabernacle are appointed (chap. xxv.) before
the tabernacle itself (chap. xxvi.). This last is no
eccentricity; the order in commanding is first the end, and then
the means; but in obeying, the order is reversed. In like manner,
it is not at all surprising if subsidiary implements, such as
benches for slaughtering. or basins for washing, which have no
importance for the cultus, properly so called, should be either
passed over altogether, or merely brought in as an appendix. The
case is not at all parallel with the omission of the most important
utensil of the sanctuary from the very passage to which it
necessarily belongs.
*****************************************
And the phenomenon is repeated; the altar of incense occurs only
in certain portions of the Priestly Code, and is absent from
others where it could not possibly have been omitted, had it been
known. The rite of the most solemn atoning sacrifice takes place
in Leviticus iv. indeed on the golden altar, but in Exodus xxix.,
Leviticus viii., ix., without its use. A still more striking
circumstance is, that in passages where the holiest incense-offering
itself is spoken of, no trace can be discovered of the corresponding
altar. This is particularly the case in Leviticus xvi. To burn incense
in the sanctuary, Aaron takes a censer, fills it with coals from the
altar of burnt-offering (ver. 12, 18-20), and lays the incense
upon them in the adytum. Similarly in Leviticus x., Numbers xvi.,
xvii., incense is offered on censers, of which each priest
possesses one. The coals are taken from the altar of
burnt-offering (Numbers xvii. 11; [A.V. xvi. 46]), which is plated
with the censers of the Korahite Levites (xvii. 3, 4; [A.V.
xvi. 38, 39]); whoever takes fire from any other source, incurs
the penalty of death (Leviticus x. 1 seq.). The altar of incense is
everywhere unknown here; the altar of burnt-offering is the only
altar, and, moreover, is always called simply 'the altar', as for
example, even in Exodus xxvii., where it would have been specially
necessary to add the qualifying expression. Only in certain
later portions of the Priestly Code does the name altar of
burnt-offering occur, viz, in those passages which do recognise the
altar of incense. In this connection the command of Exodus xxvii.
as compared with the execution in Exodus xxxviii. is
characteristic.
The golden altar in the sanctuary is originally simply the
golden table; the variation of the expression has led to a
doubling of the thing. Ezekiel does not distinguish between the
table and the altar in the temple, but uses either expression
indifferently. For he says (xii.21 seq. ): "Before the adytum
stood what looked like an altar of wood, three cubits in height,
two cubits in length and breadth, and it had projecting corners,
and its frame and its walls were of wood; this is the table which
is before the Lord." In like manner he designates the service of
the priests in the inner sanctuary as table-service (xliv.16);
table is the name, altar the function. /1/
****************************************
1. Malachi, on the other hand, designates the so-called altar
of burnt-offering as a table.
****************************************
In 1Kings vii. 48, it is true that the golden altar and the golden
table are mentioned together. It seems strange, however, that in
this case the concluding summary mentions one piece of furniture
more-- and that piece one of so great importance--than the preceding
detailed description; for in the latter only the preparation of the
golden altar is spoken of, and nothing is said of the golden table
(vi. 20-22). As matters stand, nothing is less improbable than that
some later transcriber should have interpolated the golden table
in vii. 48, regarding it, in accordance with the Pentateuch, as
distinct from the golden altar, and therefore considering its
absence as an omission. From other considerations also, it is
clear that the text of the whole chapter is in many ways corrupt
and interpolated.
It is not to be wondered at if in the post-exilian temple there
existed both a golden altar and a golden table. We learn from
1Maccabees i. 21 seq., iv. 49, that both were carried off by
Antiochus Epiphanes, and renewed at the Feast of the Dedication.
But it causes no small surprise to find that at the destruction
of Jerusalem the Romans found and carried off table and candlestick
only. What can have become, in the meantime, of the golden altar
of incense? And it is further worth remarking that in the LXX the
passage Exodus xxxvii.25-29 is absent; that is to say, the altar
of incense is indeed commanded, but there is no word of its
execution. In these circumstances, finally, the vacillating
statement as to its position in Exodus xxx. 6, and the supposed
mistake of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, are important
and intelligible. Compare also 2Maccabees ii.5, where only the table,
but not the altar, is hidden by Jeremiah.
So much for the offering of incense and its altar. We may in
like manner venture to regard it as a kind of refinement, though
rather a refinement of idea, that the flesh of the sacrifice in the
Priestly Code is no longer boiled, but consigned to the altar
flames in its raw condition. Such was not the ancient custom, as
is seen, not only from the case of Gideon already cited (Judges
vi.), but also from the procedure at Shiloh, described in 1Samuel
ii., where the sons of Eli will not wait until the flesh of the
sacrifice has been boiled, and the altar pieces burnt, but demand
their share raw for roasting. The meal which the Deity shares
with men is prepared in the same way as for men. This naive
conception gave way before advancing culture, and that at a
comparatively early date. It is possible that another cause may
also have co-operated towards this result. The old method of
preparing flesh in general use among the people, at a later period
also, was by boiling. The word B#L (to seethe in water) occurs
with extreme frequency; CLH (to roast), on the other hand, only
in Exodus xii. 8, and Isaiah xliv. 16, 19. All sacrificial flesh
(B#LH) was boiled, and there was no other kind. /1/
***********************************************
1. Accordingly one must understand (#H also of boiling (Judges vi. 19).
Compare the boiling-houses of the temple still found in Ezekiel
xlvi. 20-24. In I Sam. i. 9 pronounce _beshela_ instead of _beshilo_,
and delete W)XRY #TH.
**********************************************
But among persons of the upper class roasting must also have come
into use at an early period. "Give flesh to roast for the priest;
for he will not take sodden flesh of thee, but raw," says the
servant of the sons of Eli in 1Samuel ii. 15. The fact that in the
interval the custom of boiling had gone generally somewhat out of
fashion may accordingly have also contributed to bring about the
abandonment of the old usage of offering the sacrificial portions
boiled. In any case this is the explanation of the circumstance
that the paschal lamb, which originally was boiled like all other
offerings, could, according to the express appointment of the
Priestly Code, be eaten roasted only. /2/
**********************************
2. Compare the polemical ordinance of Exodus xii. 9 with Deuteronomy
xvi. 7.
*********************************
The phenomenon that in the Law meal is by preference offered raw,
while in the earlier period, even as an adjunct of the burnt-offering,
it was presented baked, belongs to the same category. The latter
is the case in Judges vi. 19 at least, and the statement of 1Samuel
i. 24 is also to be understood in the same sense; the sacrificer
brings meal along with him in order to bake it into _maccah_ on the spot
(Ezekiel xlvi. 20). But he may bring along with him common, that is
leavened, cakes also (1Samuel x. 3), which seem originally by no
means to have been considered unfit to be offered as in Leviticus
ii. 11. For under this law of Leviticus ii. even the presentation of
the shewbread would be inexplicable, and moreover it is certain
that at first the loaves of the feast of weeks were offerings,
properly so called, and not merely dues to the priests.
According, to Amos iv. 5, leavened bread was made use of precisely
at a particularly solemn sacrifice, and a reminiscence of this
usage has been preserved even in Leviticus vii. 13, although of course
without any practical weight being attached to it. /1/
***********************************************
1. The loaves are passed over in silence in Leviticus vii. 29 seq.,
although it is in this very place that the matter of presenting
on the part of the offerer is most fully described. And when it
is said (vii. 12),
"If he offer it for a thanksgiving (Todah), then he shall offer
with it unleavened cakes mingled with oil, and unleavened wafers
anointed with oil and fine flour (LXX), mingled with oil ;"
vii. 13, "[With] leavened cakes shall he offer as a gift with the
thank-offering of the Todah,"
the suspicion very readily occurs that verse 12 is an authentic
interpretation prefixed, to obviate beforehand the difficulty
presented by verse 13, and that similarly the first (l in verse 13
is also a later correction, which does not harmonise well by any
means with the second. Verse 13 connects itself better with
verse 11 than with verse 12.--Exod xxxiv. 25.
*********************************************
Moreover, massah also means, properly speaking, only the bread
that is prepared in haste and in the most primitive manner for
immediate use, and originally implies no contrast with leaven, but
simply with the more artificial and tedious manners of producing
ordinary bread /2/
*************************************
2. Compare Genesis xviii. 6 with xix.3.
*************************************
In the Priestly Code the materials are finer, but they are as
much as possible left in their raw condition; both are steps
in advance.
II.II.3. There is another and much more important difference in the
case of the animal sacrifice. Of this the older practice knows
only two kinds apart from extraordinary varieties, which may be
left out of account. These two are the burnt-offering (`Olah) and
the thank-offering (Shelem, Zebah, Zebah Shelamim). In the case of
the first the whole animal is offered on the altar; in the other
God receives, besides the blood, only an honorary portion, while
the rest of the flesh is eaten by the sacrificial guests. Now it
is worth noticing how seldom the burnt-offering occurs alone. It
is necessarily so in the case of human sacrifice (Genesis xxii. 2
seq.; Judges xi. 31; /1/ 2Kings iii. 27; Jeremiah xix.5);
**********************************
3. It is probable that Jephthah expected a human creature and not an
animal to meet him from his house.
*********************************
otherwise it is not usual (Genesis viii. 20; Numbers xxiii. 1 seq.;
Judges vi. 20, 26, xiii. 16, 23; 1Samuel vii. 9 seq.; 1Kings
iii. 4, xviii. 34,38); /1/ moreover, all the examples
****************************************
1. In the above list of passages no notice is taken of the
_sacrificium juge_ of 2Kings xvi.15. The statement in 1Kings iii. 4
is perhaps to be taken along with iii. 15, but does not become at
all more credible on that account. Of course it is understood that
only those passages are cited here in which mention is made of
offerings actually made, and not merely general statements about
one or more kinds of offering. The latter could very well fix
attention upon the `Olah alone without thereby throwing any light
upon the question as to the actual practice.
****************************************
just cited are extraordinary or mythical in their character, a
circumstance that may not affect the evidence of the existence of
the custom in itself, but is important as regards the statistics of
its frequency. As a rule, the `Olah occurs only in conjunction
with Zebahim, and when this is the case the latter are in the
majority and are always in the plural, while on the other hand
the first is frequently in the singular. /2/
********************************************
1. Exodus x. 25, xviii. 12, xxiv. 5, xxxii. 6; Joshua viii. 31;
Judges xx. 26, xxi. 4; 1Samuel vi. 14 seq., x. 8, xiii. 9-12;
2Samuel vi. 17 seq., xxiv. 23-25, 1Kings iii. 15, viii. 63 seq.;
2Kings v. 17, x. 24, 25. The zeugma in Judges xx. 26, xxi.4 is
inconsistent with the older _usus loquendi_. The proper name
for the holocaust appears to be KLYL (Deuteronomy xxxiii. 10;
1Samuel vii.9) not (LH. It is impossible to decide whether
the sacrificial due in all sorts of Zebah was the same,
but most probably it was not. Probably the Shelamim are a
more solemn kind of sacrifice than the simple Zebah. The word 'fat'
is used in Genesis iv. 4; Exodus xxiii. 18 in a very general sense.
It is not quite clear what is meant by the blessing of the Zebah
in 1Samuel ix. 13; perhaps a kind of grace before meat.
********************************************
They supplement each other like two corresponding halves; the
`Olah is, as the name implies, properly speaking, nothing more
than the part of a great offering that reaches the altar. One
might therefore designate as `Olah also that part of a single
animal which is consecrated to the Deity; this, however, is never
done; neither of the blood nor of the fat [Q+R] is the verb H(LH
used, but only of the pieces of the flesh, of which in the case of
the minor offering nothing was burnt. But the distinction is
merely one of degree; there is none in kind; a small Zebah,
enlarged and augmented, becomes an `Olah and Zebahim; out of a
certain number of slaughtered animals which are eaten by the
sacrificial company, one is devoted to God and wholly given to the
flames. For the rest, it must be borne in mind that as a rule it
is only great sacrificial feasts that the historical books take
occasion to mention, and that consequently the burnt-offering,
notwithstanding what has been said, comes before us with greater
prominence than can have been the average case in ordinary life.
Customarily, It is certain, none but thank-offerings were offered;
necessarily so if slaughtering could only be done beside the
altar. Where mention is made of a simple offering in the Books of
Samuel and Kings, that it is a thank-offering is matter of course.
1Samuel ii. 12 seq. is in this connection also particularly
instructive.
From what has been said it results that according to the praxis of
the older period a meal was almost always connected with a
sacrifice. It was the rule that only blood and fat were laid upon
the altar, but the people ate the flesh; only in the case of very
great sacrificial feasts was a large animal (one or more) given to
Jehovah. Where a sacrifice took place, there was also eating and
drinking (Exodus xxxii. 6; Judges ix. 27; 2Samuel xv. 11 seq.;
Amos ii. 7); there was no offering without a meal, and no meal
without an offering (1Kings i. 9); at no important Bamah was
entertainment wholly wanting, such a LESXH as that in which Samuel
feasted Saul, or Jeremiah the Rechabites (1Samuel ix. 22; Jeremiah
xxxv. 2). To be merry, to eat and drink before Jehovah, is a usual
form of speech down to the period of Deuteronomy; even Ezekiel
calls the cultus on the high places an eating upon the mountains
(1Samuel ix. 13,19 seq ), and in Zechariah the pots in the temple
have a special sanctity (Zech. xiv. 20). By means of the meal in
presence of Jehovah is established a covenant fellowship on the one
hand between Him and the guests, and on the other hand between the
guests themselves reciprocally, which is essential for the idea of
sacrifice and gives their name to the Shelamim (compare Exodus
xviii. 12, xxiv. 11). In ordinary slaughterings this notion is not
strongly present, but in solemn sacrifices it was in full vigour.
It is God who invites, for the house is His; His also is the gift,
which must be brought to Him entire by the offerer before the
altar, and the greater portion of which He gives up to His guests
only affer that. Thus in a certain sense they eat at God's
table, and must accordingly propare or sanctify themselves for
it. /1/
***************************************
1. In order to appear before Jehovah the guest adorns himself
with clothes and ornaments (Exodus iii. 22, xi. 2 seq.;
Hosea ii. 15 [A.V. 13]; Ezekiel xvi. 13; compare Koran, Sur. xx. 61),
sanctifies himself (Numbers xi. 18) and is sanctified (1Samuel xvi. 5;
Exodus xix. 10, 14). The sacrificial meal is regarded as Kodesh
(hallowed) for not only the priests, but all the sanctified persons
eat Kodesh (1Samuel xxi. 5 seq. On what is meant by sanctification
light is thrown by 1Samuel xxi. 5; 2Samuel xi. 2. Compare L) LPNW
XNP YB) ( Job xiii. 16; Leviticus vii. 20; Matthew xxii. 11-13). Jehovah
invites the armies of the nations to His sacrifice, for which
He delivers over to them some other nation, and calls the Medes,
to whom He gives Babylon over, His sanctified ones, that is,
His guests (Zephaniah i. 7 seq.; Jeremiah xlvi. 10; Ezekiel xxxix 17;
Isaiah xiii. 3).
****************************************
Even on occasions that, to our way of thinking, seem highly unsuitable,
the meal is nevertheless not wanting (Judges xx. 26, xxi. 4;
1Sam xiii. 9-12). That perfect propriety was not always observed
might be taken for granted, and is proved by Isaiah xxviii. 8
even with regard to the temple of Jerusalem; "all tables are full
of vomit, there is no room." Hence also Eli's suspicion regarding
Hannah was a natural one, and by no means so startling as it appears.
How different from this picture is that suggested by the Priestly
Code! Here one no longer remarks that a meal accompanies every
sacrifice; eating before Jehovah, which even in Deuteronomy is
just the expression for sacrificing, nowhere occurs, or at all
events is no act of divine worship. Slaying and sacrificing are no
longer coincident, the thank-offering of which the breast and right
shoulder are to be consecrated is something different from the old
simple Zebah. But, precisely for this reason, it has lost its
former broad significance. The _mizbeah_, that is, the place where
the _zebahim_ are to be offered, has been transformed into a _mizbah
ha-'olah_. The burnt-offering has become quite independent and
comes everywhere into the foreground, the sacrifices which are
unconnected with a meal altogether predominate,--so much that, as
is well known, Theophrastus could declare there were no others
among the Jews, who in this way were differentiated from all
other nations. /1/ Where formerly a
****************************************
1. Porphyry, De Abstin. ii.26. Compare Joseph., Contra Apion,
ii. 13: )OUTOI )EUXONTAI UEIN (EKATOMBAS TOIS QEOIS KAI XRWNTAI
TOIS (IEREIOIS PROS )EUWXIAN.
******************************************
thank-offering which was eaten before Jehovah, and which might with
greater clearness be called a sacrificial meal, was prescribed, the
Priestly Code, as we shall afterwards see, has made out of it
simple dues to the priests, as, for example, in the case of the
first-born and of firstlings. Only in this point it still bears
involuntary testimony to the old custom by applying the names
_Todah, Neder, and Nedabah_, of which the last two in particular must
necessarily have a quite general meaning (Leviticus xxii. 18; Ezekiel
xlvi. 12), exclusively to the thank-offering, while _Milluim_ and
paschal sacrifice are merely subordinate varieties of it.
II.II.4. What the thank-offering has lost, the sin and trespass
offering have gained; the voluntary private offering which the
sacrificer ate in a joyful company at the holy place has given
way before the compulsory, of which he obtains no share, and from
which the character of the sacred meal has been altogether taken
away. The burnt-offering, it is true, still continues to be a
meal, if only a one-sided one, of which God alone partakes; but
in the case of the sin-offering everything is kept far out of sight
which could recall a meal, as, for example, the accompaniments of
meal and wine, oil and salt; of the flesh no portion reaches the
altar, it all goes as a fine to the priest. Now, of this kind of
sacrifice, which has an enormous importance in the Priestly Code,
not a single trace occurs in the rest of the Old Testament before
Ezekiel, neither in the Jehovist and Deuteronomist, nor in the
historical and prophetical books. /1/
**********************************************
1. How great is the difference in Deuteronomy xxi. 1-9; how very
remote the sacrificial idea!
*********************************************
`Olah and Zebah comprehend all animal sacrifices, `Olah and Minhah,
or Zebah and Minhah, all sacrifices whatsoever; nowhere is a special
kind of sacrifice for atonement met with (1Samuel iii. 14).
Hos. iv. 8 does indeed say: "They eat the sin of my people, and they
are greedy for its guilts," but the interpretation which will have it
that the priests are here reproached with in the first instance
themselves inducing the people to falsification of the sacred dues,
in order to make these up again with the produce of the sin and
trespass offerings, is either too subtle or too dull. /2/
****************************************
2. The sin and guilt are the sacrificial worship generally as
carried on by the people (viii. 11; Amos iv. 4); in the entire
section the prophet is preparing the way for the here sharply
accentuated reproach against the priests that they neglect
the Torah and encourage the popular propensity to superstitious
and impure religious service. Besides, where is there any
reproach at all, according to the Pentateuch, in the first section
of iv. 8? And the second speaks of (WNM, not of )#MM.
*******************************************
It would be less unreasonable to co-ordinate with the similarly
named sin and trespass offering of the Pentateuch the five golden
mice, and the five golden emerods with which the Philistines send
back the ark, and which in 1Samuel vi. 3, 4, 8 are designated _asham_,
or, still better, the sin and trespass monies which, according to
2Kings xii. 17 [A.V. 16], fell to the share of the Jerusalem
priests. Only the fact is that even in the second passage the
_asham_ and _hattath_ are no sacrifices, but, more exactly to
render the original meaning of the words, mere fines, and in fact money
fines. On the other hand, the _hattath_ referred to in Micah vi. 7
has nothing to do with a due of the priests, but simply denotes
the guilt which eventually another takes upon himself. Even in
Isaiah liii. 10, a passage which is certainly late, _asham_ must not
be taken in the technical sense of the ritual legislation, but
simply (as in Micah) in the sense of guilt, borne by the innocent
for the guilty. For the explanation of this prophetic passage
Gramberg has rightly had recourse to the narrative of 2Samuel
xi. 1-14. "Upon Saul and upon his house lies blood-guiltiness, for
having slain the Gibeonites" is announced to David as the cause of
a three years' famine. When asked how it can be taken away, the
Gibeonites answer,
"It is not a matter of silver and gold to us with respect to Saul
and his house; let seven men of his family be delivered to us that
we may hang them up unto the Lord in Gibeah of Saul upon the
mountain of the Lord."
This was done; all the seven were hanged.
_A*sham_ and _hattath_ as offerings occur for the first time in
Ezekiel, and appear, not long before his day to have come into the
place of the earlier pecuniary fines (2Kings xii. 17 [16]), which
perhaps already also admitted of being paid in kind; probably in
the seventh century, which seems to have been very open to the
mystery of atonement and bloodshedding, and very fertile in the
introduction of new religious usages. /1/
*********************************************
1. Consider for example the prevalence of child sacrifice precisely
at this time, the introduction of incense, the new fashions which
King Manasseh brought in, and of which certainly much survived
that suited the temper of the period, and admitted of being conjoined
with the worship of Jehovah, or even seemed to enhance its dignity
and solemnity.
**********************************************
The sin and trespass offerings of the Pentateuch still bear traces
of their origin in fines and penalties; they are not gifts to God,
they are not even symbolical, they are simply mulcts payable to the
priests, partly of fixed commutation value (Leviticus v. 15). Apart
from the mechanical burning of the fat they have in common with
the sacrifice only the shedding of blood, originally a secondary
matter, which has here become the chief thing. This circumstance
is an additional proof of our thesis. The ritual of the simple
offering has three acts:
(1.) the presentation of the living animal before Jehovah,
and the laying on of hands as a token of manumission on the part
of the offerer;
(2.) the slaughtering and the sprinkling of the blood on the altar;
(3.) the real or seeming gift of the sacrificial portions to the Deity,
and the meal of the human guests.
In the case of the burnt-offering the meal in the third act disappears,
and the slaughtering in the second comes into prominence as significant
and sacred, inasmuch as (what is always expressly stated) it must
take place in the presence of Jehovah, at the north side of the altar.
In the case of the sin and trespass offering the third act is dropped
entirely, and accordingly the whole significance of the rite attaches
to the slaughtering, which of course also takes place before the altar,
and to the sprinkling of the blood, which has become peculiarly
developed here. It is obvious how the metamorphosis of the gift
and the meal into a bloody atonement advances and reaches its
acme in this last sacrificial act.
This ritual seems to betray its novelty even within the Priestly
Code itself by a certain vacillation. In the older corpus of law
(Leviticus xvii.-xxvi.) which has been taken into that document, all
sacrifices are still embraced under one or other of the two heads
ZBX and (LH (xvii. 8, xxii. 18, 21); there are no others. The _asham_
indeed occurs in xix. 21 seq., but, as is recognised, only in a
later addition; on the other hand,it is not demanded /1/ in
xxii.14,
************************************
1. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the _asham_ here,
in the case of property unlawfully held, is simply the impost of
a fifth part of the value, and not the sacrifice of a ram, which
in Leviticus v. is required in addition. In Numbers v. also,
precisely this fifth part is called _asham_.
*************************************
where it must have been according to Leviticus v. and Numbers v.
And even apart from Leviticus xvii.-xxvi there is on this point
no sort of agreement between the kernel of the Priestly Code
and the later additions, or "novels," so to speak. For one thing,
there is a difference as to the ritual of the most solemn sin-offering
between Exodus xxix., Leviticus ix. on the one hand, and Leviticus iv.
on the other; and what is still more serious, the trespass-offering
never occurs in the primary but only in the secondary passages,
Leviticus iv.-vii., xiv.; Numbers v.7, 8, vi. 1, xviii. 9. In the
latter, moreover, the distinction between _asham_ and _hattath_ is not
very clear, but only the intention to make it, perhaps because in
the old praxis there actually was a distinction between KSP XT)WT
and KSP )#M, and in Ezekiel between X+)T and )#M. /2/
***************************************
2. The three sections, Leviticus iv. 1-35 (hattath), v.1-13
(hattath-asham), and v. 14-26 (asham), are essentially not
co-ordinate parts of one whole, but independent pieces proceeding
from the same school. For v. 1-13 is no continuation of or appendix
to iv. 27-35, but a quite independent treatment of the same material,
with important differences of form. The place of the systematic
generality of chap. iv. is here taken by the definite individual case,
and what is analogous to it; the ritual is given with less minuteness,
and the hierarchical subordination of ranks has no influence on
the classification of offences. In this section also _asham_ and
_hattath_ occur interchangeably as synonymous. In the third section
a ram as an _asham_ is prescribed (v. 17-19) for the very case in
which in the first a he-goat or a she-goat is required as _hattath_
(iv. 22, 27). The third section has indeed in form greater
similarity to the second, but cannot be regarded as its true
completion, for this simple reason, that the latter does not
distiguish between _hattath_ and _asham_. If Leviticus v. 13-16,
20-26 be followed simply without regard being had to vers. 17-19,
the _asham_ comes in only in the case of voluntary restitution of
property illegally come by or detained, more particularly of
the sacred dues. The goods must be restored to their owner
augmented by a fifth part of their value; and as an _asham_ there
must be added a ram, which falls to the sanctuary. In Num v. 5-10
the state of the case is indeed the same, but the language employed
is different, for in this passage it is the restored property that
is called _asham_, and the ram is called )YL HKPRYM. Comp. Leviticus
xxii. 14.
****************************************
II.III.
The turning-point in the history of the sacrificial system was
the reformation of Josiah; what we find in the Priestly Code is
the matured result of that event. It is precisely in the
distinctions that are characteristic of the sacrificial law as
compared with the ancient sacrificial praxis that we have evidence
of the fact that, if not all exactly occasioned by the
centralisation of the worship, they were almost all somehow at
least connected with that change.
In the early days, worship arose out of the midst of ordinary
life, and was in most intimate and manifold connection with it.
A sacrifice was a meal, a fact showing how remote was the idea of
antithesis between spiritual earnestness and secular joyousness.
A meal unites a definite circle of guests, and in this way the
sacrifice brought into connection the members of the family, the
associates of the corporation, the soldiers of the army, and,
generally speaking, the constituents of any permanent or
temporary society. It is earthly relationships that receive
their consecration thereby, and in correspondence are the natural
festal occasions presented by the vicissitudes of life. Year
after year the return of vintage, corn-harvest, and sheep-shearing
brought together the members of the household to eat and to drink
in the presence of Jehovah; and besides these there were less
regularly recurring events which were celebrated in one circle
after another. There was no warlike expedition which was not
inaugurated in this fashion, no agreement that was not thus
ratified, no important undertaking of any kind was gone about
without a sacrifice! /1/
******************************************
1. Sacrifice is used as a pretext in 1Samuel xvi. 1 seq.;
1Kings i. 9 seq. Compare Proverbs vii. 14.
*****************************************
When an honoured guest arrives, there is slaughtered for him a calf,
not without an offering of the blood and fat to the Deity.
The occasion arising out of daily life is thus inseparable
from the holy action, and is what gives it meaning and character;
an end corresponding to the situation always underlies it.
Hence also prayer must not be wanting. The verb H(TYR, to "burn"
(fat and _minha_), means simply to "pray," and conversely BQ# )T
YHWH, "to seek Jehovah," in point of fact not unfrequently means
to "sacrifice." The gift serves to reinforce the question
or the request, and to express thankfulness; and the prayer
is its interpretation. This of course is rather incidentally
indicated than expressly said (Hos. v. 6; Isaiah i. 15; Jeremiah
xiv. 12; 1Kings viii. 27 seq.; Proverbs xv. 8); we have a specimen
of a grace for the offering of the festival gift only in Deuteronomy
xxvi. 3 seq.; a blessing is pronounced when the slaughtering takes place
(1Samuel ix. 13). The prayer of course is simply the expression
of the feeling of the occasion, with which accordingly it varies
in manifold ways. Arising out of the exigencies and directed
to the objects of daily life, the sacrifices reflect in themselves
a correspondingly rich variety. Our wedding, baptismal, and funeral
feasts on the one hand, and our banquets for all sorts of occasions
on the other, might still be adduced as the most obvious comparison,
were it not that here too the divorce between sacred and secular
destroys it. Religious worship was a natural thing in Hebrew antiquity;
it was the blossom of life, the heights and depths of which it was its
business to transfigure and glorify.
The law which abolished all sacrificial seats, with a single
exception, severed this connection. Deuteronomy indeed does not
contemplate such a result. Here, in marked opposition to what we
find in the Priestly Code, to eat and be merry before Jehovah is
the standing phrase for sacrificing; the idea is that in
concentrating all the worship towards Jerusalem, all that is
effected is a mere change of place, the essence of the thing
remaining unaltered. This, however, was a mistake. To celebrate
the vintage festival among one's native hills, and to celebrate it
at Jerusalem, were two very different things; it was not a matter
of indifference whether one could seize on the spot any occasion
that casually offered itself for a sacrificial meal, or whether it
was necessary that one should first enter upon a journey. And it
was not the same thing to appear by oneself at home before Jehovah
and to lose oneself in a large congregation at the common seat of
worship. Human life has its root in local environment, and so also
had the ancient cultus; in being transplanted from its natural
soil it was deprived of its natural nourishment. A separation
between it and the daily life was inevitable, and Deuteronomy
itself paved the way for this result by permitting profane
slaughtering. A man lived in Hebron, but sacrificed in Jerusalem;
life and worship fell apart. The consequences which lie dormant in
the Deuteronomic law are fully developed in the Priestly Code.
This is the reason why the sacrifice combined with a meal,
formerly by far the chief, now falls completely into the
background. One could eat flesh at home, but in Jerusalem one's
business was to do worship. Accordingly, those sacrifices were
preferred in which the religious character came to the front with
the utmost possible purity and without any admixture of natural
elements, sacrifices of which God received everything and man
nothing,--burnt-offerings, sin-offerings, and trespass-offerings.
If formerly the sacrifice had taken its complexion from the
quality of the occasion which led to it, it now had essentially
but one uniform purpose--to be a medium of worship. The warm
pulse of life no longer throbbed in it to animate it; it was no
longer the blossom and the fruit of every branch of life; it had
its own meaning all to itself. It symbolised worship, and that was
enough. The soul was fled; the shell remained, upon the shaping
out of which every energy was now concentrated. A manifoldness
of rites took the place of individualising occasions; technique
was the main thing, and strict fidelity to rubric.
Once cultus was spontaneous, now it is a thing of statute. The
satisfaction which it affords is, properly speaking, something
which lies outside of itself and consists in the moral satisfaction
arising out of the conscientiousness with which the ritual
precepts, once for all enjoined by God on His people, are
fulfilled. The freewill offering is not indeed forbidden, but
value in the strict sense is attached only to those which have
been prescribed, and which accordingly preponderate everywhere.
And even in the case of the freewill offering, everything must
strictly and accurately comply with the restrictions of the
ordinance; if any one in the fulness of his heart had offered in
a _zebah shelamim_ more pieces of flesh than the ritual enjoined, it
would have been the worse for him.
Of old the sacrifice combined with a meal had established a
special relation between the Deity and a definite society of
guests; the natural sacrificial society was the family or the
clan (1Samuel i. 1seq., xvi. 1 seq., xx. 6). Now the smaller sacred
fellowships get lost, the varied groups of social life disappear in
the neutral shadow of the universal congregation or church [(DH,
QHL]. The notion of this last is foreign to Hebrew antiquity, but
runs through the Priestly Code from beginning to end. Like the
worship itself, its subject also became abstract, a spiritual
entity which could be kept together by no other means except
worship. As now the participation of the "congregation of the
children of Israel" in the sacrifice was of necessity always
mainly ideal, the consequence was that the sacred action came to
be regarded as essentially perfect by virtue of its own efficacy
in being performed by the priest, even though no one was present.
Hence later the necessity for a special sacrificial deputation,
the _anshe ma'amad_. The connection of all this with the Judaising
tendency to remove God to a distance from man, it may be added,
is clear. /1/
*************************************
1. It is not asserted that the cultus before the Iaw (of which
the darker sides are known from Amos and Hosea) was better
than the legal, but merely that it was more original; the standard
of judgment being, not the moral element, but merely the idea,
the primary meaning of worship. Nor is it disputed further that
the belief in the dependence of sacrifices and other sacred acts
upon a laboriously strict compliance with traditional and prescriptive
rites occurs in the case of certain peoples, even in the remotest
antiquity. But with the Israelites, judging by the testimony of the
historical and prophetical books, this was not on the whole the
case any more than with the ancient Greeks; there were no
Brahmans or Magians in either case. Moreover, it must be carefully
noted that not even in the Priestly Code do we yet find the same
childish appreciation of the cultus as occurs in such a work as the
Rigveda, and that the strict rules are not prescribed and
maintained with any such notion in view as that by their
observance alone can the taste of the Deity be pleased; the idea
of God is here even strikingly remote from the anthropomorphic,
and the whole cultus is nothing more than an exercise in piety
which has simply been enjoined so once for all without any one
being in any way the better for it.
******************************************
Two details still deserve special prominence here. In the Priestly
Code the most important sacrifice is the burnt-offering; that is
to say, in point of fact, the _tamid_, the _holocaustum juge_,
consisting of two yearling lambs which are daily consumed upon
the "altar of burnt-offering," one in the morning, another
in the evening. The custom of daily offering a fixed sacrifice
at a definite time existed indeed, in a simpler form, /2/
****************************************
2. See Kuenen, Godsdietzst van Israel, ii. 271. According to 2Kings
xvi. 15, an (LH in the morning and a MNXH in the evening were daily
offered in the temple of Jerusalem, in the time of Ahaz. Ezekiel also
(xlvi. 13-15) speaks only of the morning (LH. Compare also Ezra
ix. 4; Nehemiah x. 33. In the Priestly Code the evening _minhah_ has
risen to the dignity of a second _`olah_; but at the same time
survives in the daily _minhah_ of the high priest, and is now
offered in the morning also (Leviticus vi. 12-16). The daily _minhah_
appears to be older than the daily _`olah_. For while it was a
natural thing to prepare a meal regularly for the Deity, the
expense of a daily `olah was too great for an ordinary place of
worship, and, besides, it was not in accordance with the custom of
men to eat flesh every day. The offering of the daily _minhah_ is
already employed in 1Kings xviii. 29, 36, as a mark of time to
denote the afternoon, and this use is continued down to the latest
period, while the tamid, ie., the `olah, is never so utilised. The
oddest custom of all, however, was doubtless not the daily
_minhah_, but the offering of the shewbread, which served the same
purpose, but was not laid out fresh every day.
*****************************************
even in the pre-exilian period, but alongside of it at that time,
the freewill private offerings had a much more important place,
and bulked much more largely. In the law the _tamid_ is in point
of fact the fundamental element of the worship, for even the sacrifices
of Sabbaths and feast days consist only of its numerical increase
(compare Numbers xxviii., xxix.). Still later, when it is said
in the Book of Daniel that the _tamid_ was done away, this is equivalent
to saying that the worship was abolished (viii. 11-13, xi. 31, xii. 11).
But now the dominant position of the daily, Sabbath day, and festival
_tamid_ means that the sacrificial worship had assumed a perfectly
firm shape, which was independent of every special motive and of
all spontaneity; and further (what is closely connected with
this), that it took place for the sake of the congregation,--the
"congregation" in the technical sense attached to that word in the
Law. Hence the necessity for the general temple-tax, the
prototype of which is found in the poll-tax of half a shekel for
the service of the tabernacle in Exodus xxx. 11 seq. Prior to the
exile, the regular sacrifice was paid for by the Kings of Judah,
and in Ezekiel the monarch still continues to defray the expenses
not only of the Sabbath day and festival sacrifices (xiv. 17
seq.), but also of the _tamid_ (xlvi. 13-15). /1/
*************************************
1. Compare LXX*. The Massoretic text has corrected the third person
(referring to the princes) into the second, making it an address
to the priests, which, however, is quite impossible in Ezekiel.
*************************************
It is also a mark of the date that, according to Exodus xxx.,
the expenses of the temple worship are met directly out of the poll-tax
levied from the community, which can only be explained by the fact
that at that time there had ceased to be any sovereign. So completely
was the sacrifice the affair of the community in Judaism that
the voluntary _qorban_ of the individual became metamorphosed
into a money payment as a contribution to the cost of the public
worship (Mark vii., xii. 42 seq; Matthew xxvii. 6).
The second point is this: Just as the special purposes and
occasions of sacrifice fall out of sight, there comes into
increasing prominence the one uniform and universal occasion--that
of sin; and one uniform and universal purpose--that of
propitiation. In the Priestly Code the peculiar mystery in the
case of all animal sacrifices is atonement by blood; this appears
in its purest development in the case of the sin and trespass
offerings, which are offered as well for individuals as for the
congregation and for its head. In a certain sense the great day
of atonement is the culmination of the whole religious and
sacrificial service, to which, amid all diversities of ritual,
continuously underlying reference to sin is common throughout. Of
this feature the ancient sacrifices present few traces. It was
indeed sought at a very early period to influence the doubtful or
threatening mood of Deity, and make His countenance gracious by
means of rich gifts, but the gift had, as was natural then, the
character of a tentative effort only (Micah vi. 6). There was no
such thought as that a definite guilt must and could be taken away
by means of a prescribed offering. When the law discriminates
between such sins as are covered by an offering and such sins as
relentlessly are visited with wrath, it makes a distinction very
remote from the antique; to Hebrew antiquity the wrath of God was
something quite incalculable, its causes were never known, much
less was it possible to enumerate beforehand those sins which
kindled it and those which did not. /1/
**********************************
1. When the wrath is regulated by the conditions of the "covenant,"
the original notion (which scorns the thought of adjustment) is
completely changed. What gave the thing its mysterious awfulness
was precisely this: that in no way was it possible to guard against
it, and that nothing could avail to counteract it. Under the pressure
of Jehovah's wrath not only was sacrifice abandoned, but even
the mention of His name was shunned so as to avoid attracting
His attention (Hos iii. 4, ix. 4; Amos vi. 10).
***********************************
An underlying reference of sacrifice to sin, speaking generally,
was entirely absent. The ancient offerings were wholly of a joyous
nature,--a merrymaking before Jehovah with music and song,
timbrels, flutes, and stringed instruments (Hos. ix. 1 seq.; Amos
v. 23, viii. 3; Isa xxx. 3). No greater contrast could be conceived
than the monotonous seriousness of the so-called Mosaic worship.
NOMOS PAREISHLQEN (INA PLEONASH| TO PARAPTWMA
["But law came in, with the result that the trespass multiplied".
Romans 5:20 NRSV)]
In this way the spiritualisation of the worship is seen in the
Priestly Code as advancing _pari passu_ with its centralisation.
It receives, so to speak, an abstract religious character; it
separates itself in the first instance from daily life, and then
absorbs the latter by becoming, strictly speaking, its proper
business. The consequences for the future were momentous. The
Mosaic "congregation" is the mother of the Christian church; the
Jews were the creators of that idea.
We may compare the cultus in the olden time to the green tree
which grows up out of the soil as it will and can; later it
becomes the regularly shapen timber, ever more artificially
shaped with square and compass. Obviously there is a close
connection between the qualitative antithesis we have just been
expounding and the formal one of law and custom from which we set
out. Between "naturaliter ea quae legis sunt facere" ["do
instinctively what the law requires" Romans 2:14 NRSV] and
"secundum legem agere" there is indeed a more than external
difference. If at the end of our first section we found
improbable precisely in this region the independent co-existence
of ancient praxis and Mosaic law, the improbability becomes
still greater from the fact that the latter is filled with a quite
different spirit, which can be apprehended only as Spirit of the age
(Zeitgeist). It is not from the atmosphere of the old kingdom,
but from that of the church of the second temple, that
the Priestly Code draws its breath. It is in accordance with this
that the sacrificial ordinances as regards their positive contents
are no less completely ignored by antiquity than they are
scrupulously followed by the post-exilian time.
CHAPTER III. THE SACRED FEASTS.
The feasts, strictly speaking, belong to the preceding chapter,
for originally they were simply regularly recurring occasions for
sacrifice. The results of the investigation there made accordingly
repeat themselves here, but with such clearness and precision as
make it worth while to give the subject a separate consideration.
In the first place and chiefly, the history of the solar festivals,
that of those festivals which follow the seasons of the year,
claims our attention.
III.I.1 In the Jehovistic and Deuteronomistic parts of the Pentateuch
there predominates a rotation of three great festivals, which alone
receive the proper designation of _hag_:
"Three times in the year shalt thou keep festival unto me, three times
in the year shall all thy men appear before the Lord Jehovah,
the God of Israel" (Exodus xxiii. 14, 17, xxxiv. 23; Deuteronomy xvi. 16).
"The feast of unleavened bread (maccoth) shalt thou keep; seven days
shalt thou eat _maccoth_ as I commanded thee, in the time appointed
of the month Abib, for in it thou camest out from Egypt; and none
shall appear before me empty; and the feast of harvest (qasir),
the first-fruits of thy labours, which thou hast sown in the field;
and the feast of ingathering (asiph), in the end of the year,
when thou gatherest in thy labours out of the field."
So runs the command in the Book of the Covenant (Exodus xxiii. 15, 16).
The Law of the Two Tables (Exodus xxxiv. 18 seq.) is similar:
"The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep. Seven days shalt
thou eat unleavened bread, as I commanded thee, in the time
of the month Abib: for in the month Abib thou camest out of Egypt.
All that openeth the womb is mine; every firstling among thy cattle,
whether ox or sheep, that is male. The firstling of an ass thou shalt
redeem with a lamb: and if thou redeem him not, then shalt thou break
his neck. All the firstborn of thy sons shalt thou redeem. And none
shall appear before me empty. Six days shalt thou work; but on the
seventh day shalt thou rest: even in ploughing time and in harvest
shalt thou rest. And the feast of weeks (shabuoth) shalt thou observe,
the feasts of the first-fruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of
ingathering (asiph) at the change of the year." Minuter, on the other
hand, and of a somewhat different character, are the precepts laid
down in Deuteronomy xvi.:
"Take heed to the month Abib, and keep the passover unto Jehovah
thy God, for in the month Abib did Jehovah thy God bring thee
forth out of Egypt by night. Thou shalt therefore sacrifice the
passover unto Jehovah thy God, of the flock or of the herd, in the
place which Jehovah shall choose for the habitation of His name.
Thou shalt eat no leavened bread with it; seven days shalt thou
eat unleavened bread (maccoth) therewith, the bread of affliction,
for thou camest forth out of the land of Egypt in anxious haste,
that all the days of thy life thou mayest remember the day when
thou camest forth out of the land of Egypt. There shall no
leavened bread be seen with thee in all thy border seven days, and
of the flesh which thou didst sacrifice on the first day, in the
evening, nothing shall remain all night until the morning. Thou
mayest not sacrifice the passover within any of thy gates which
the Lord thy God giveth thee, but at the place which Jehovah thy
God shall choose for the habitation of His name, there shalt thou
sacrifice the passover, in the evening, at the going down of the
sun, at the time of thy coming forth out of Egypt. And thou
shalt boil and eat it in the place which the Lord thy God shall
choose, and in the morning shalt thou return to thy home. Six
days shalt thou eat _maccoth_, and on the seventh day shall be the
closing feast to Jehovah thy God; thou shalt do no work therein"
(ver. 1-8).
"Seven weeks thenceforward shalt thou number unto thee; from such
time as thou beginnest to put the sickle to the corn shalt thou
begin to number seven weeks, and then thou shalt keep the feast
of weeks (shabuoth) to Jehovah thy God, with a tribute of freewill
offerings in thy hand, which thou shalt give, according as the Lord
thy God hath blessed thee. And thou shalt rejoice before Jehovah
thy God, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy man-servant,
and thy maid-senant, and the Levite that is within thy gates,
and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow that are
among you in the place which Jehovah thy God shall choose
for the habitation of His name. And thou shalt remember that
thou wast a bondman in Egypt, and thou shalt observe and do
these statutes" (ver. 9-12).
"The feast of tabernacles (sukkoth) thou shalt observe
seven days after thou hast gathered in thy corn and thy wine;
and thou shalt rejoice in thy feast,--thou, and thy son, and thy
daughter, and thy man-servant, and thy maid-servant, and the
Levite, and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow that
are within thy gates. Seven days shalt thou keep a solemn feast
unto Jehovah thy God in the place which Jehovah shall choose,
because Jehovah thy God cloth bless thee in all thine increase,
and in all the works of thy hands, therefore thou shalt surely
rejoice. Three times in a year shall all thy men appear before
Jehovah thy God in the place which He shall choose: in the feast
of unleavened bread, of weeks, and of tabernacles (hag ha-maccoth,--
shabuoth,--sukkoth), and they shall not appear before me empty;
every man shall give as he is able, according to the blessing
of Jehovah thy God, which He hath given thee" (ver. 13-17).
As regards the essential nature of the two last-named
feasts, these passages are at one. The _sukkoth_ of Deuteronomy and
the _asiph_ of the Jehovistic legislation do not coincide in time
merely, but are in fact one and the same feast, the autumnal
ingathering of the wine and of the oil from the vat and press, and
of the corn from the threshing-floor. The name _asiph_ refers
immediately to the vintage and olive-gathering, to which the word
_sukkoth_ seems also to relate, being most easily explained from the
custom of the whole household, old and young, going out to the
vineyard in time of harvest, and there camping out in the open air
under the improvised shelter of booths made with branches (Isaiah i.
8). _Qacir_ and _shabuoth_ in like manner are only different names
for the same reality, namely, for the feast of the corn-reaping, or,
more strictly, the wheat-reaping, which takes place in the
beginning of summer. Thus both festivals have a purely natural
occasion. On the other hand, the spring festival, which always
opens the series, has a historical motive assigned to it, the
exodus--most expressly in Deuteronomy--being given as the event on
which it rests. The cycle nevertheless seems to presuppose and to
require the original homogeneity of all its members. Now the
twofold ritual of the _pesah_ and the maccoth points to a twofold
character of the feast. The _hag_, properly so named, is called not
_hag ha-pesah_, /1/ but hag ha-maccoth,
********************************
1. The original form of the expression of Exodus xxxiv. 25 has been
preserved in Exodus xxiii. 18 (XGGY not XG HPSX). In Deuteronomy,
although PSX is more prominent, it is called XG HMCWT in xvi. 16.
********************************
and it is only the latter that is co-ordinated with the
other two _haggim_; the name _pesah_ indeed does not occur at all
until Deuteronomy, although in the law of the two tables the
sacrifice of the first-born seems to be brought into connection
with the feast of unleavened bread. It follows that only the
_maccoth_ can be taken into account for purposes of comparison
with _qasir_ and _asiph_. As to the proper significance of _maccoth_,
the Jehovistic legislation does not find it needful to instruct its
contemporaries, but it is incidentally disclosed in Deuteronomy.
There the festival of harvest is brought into a definite relation
in point of time with that of _maccoth_; it is to be celebrated
seven weeks later. This is no new ordinance, but one that rests
upon old custom, for the name, "feast of weeks," occurs in a
passage so early as Exodus xxxiv. (comp Jeremiah v. 24). Now
"seven weeks after Easter " (Deuteronomy xvi. 9) is further explained
with greater elaborateness as meaning seven weeks after the putting
of the sickle to the corn. Thus the festival of _maccoth_ is
equivalent to that of the putting of the sickle to the corn, and
thereby light is thrown on its fixed relation to Pentecost.
Pentecost celebrates the close of the reaping, which commences
with barley harvest, and ends with that of wheat; Easter its
beginning in the "month of corn ears;" and between the two
extends the duration of harvest time, computed at seven weeks. The
whole of this _tempus classicum_ is a great festal season rounded
off by the two festivals. We gain further light from Leviticus xxiii.
9-22. /1/
******************************************
1. Against this there is of course possible the objection that
the passage at present forms part of the Priestly Code. But the
collection of laws embraced in Leviticus xvii.-xxvi, it is well
known, has merely been redacted and incorporated by the author of
the Priestly Code, and originally was an independent corpus
marking the transition from Deuteronomy to the Priestly Code,
sometimes approximating more to the one, and at other times
to the other, and the use of Leviticus xxiii. 9-22 in this
connection is completely justified by the consideration that
only in this way do the rites it describes find meaning and vitality.
*******************************************
The Easter point is here, as in Deuteronomy, fixed as being
the beginning of harvest, but is still more definitely determined
as the day after the first Sabbath falling within harvest time,
and Pentecost follows the same reckoning. And the special Easter
ritual consists in the offering of a barley sheaf; before this it
is not lawful to taste of the new crop; and the corresponding
Pentecostal rite is the offering of ordinary wheaten loaves. The
corn harvest begins with barley and ends with wheat; at the
beginning the first-fruits are presented in their crude state as a
sheaf, just as men in like manner partake of the new growth
in the form of parched ears (Leviticus xxiii. 14; Josh. v. 11);
at the end they are prepared in the form of common bread.
Thus the _maccoth_ now begin to be intelligible. As has been
already said (see p. 69), they are not, strictly speaking,
duly prepared loaves, but the bread that is hurriedly baked
to meet a pressing emergency (1Sam. xxviii. 24); thus they
are quite correctly associated with the haste of the exodus,
and described as bread of affliction. At first people do not take
time in a leisurely way to leaven, knead, and bake the year's new
bread, but a hasty cake is prepared in the ashes; this is what is
meant by maccoth. They are contrasted with the Pentecostal
loaves precisely as are the sheaf and the parched ears, which
last, according to Josh. v. 11, may be eaten in their stead, and
without a doubt they were originally not the Easter food of men
merely, but also of the Deity, so that the sheaf comes under the
category of the later spiritual refinements of sacrificial
material. Easter then is the opening, as Pentecost is the closing
festivity, or (what means the same thing) `acereth, /1/ of the seven
*******************************************
1. Haneberg, Alterhuemer, 2d edit., p. 656. In Deuteronomy Pentecost
as _`acereth_ lasts for only one day, while Easter and the feast
of tabernacles each ]ast a week.
*******************************************
weeks' "joy of harvest," and the spring festival no longer
puzzles us by the place it holds in the cycle of the three yearly
festivities. But what is the state of the case as regards the
_pesah_? The meaning of the name is not clear; as we have seen, the
word first occurs in Deuteronomy, and there also the time of the
celebration is restricted to the evening and night of the first day
of _maccoth_, from sunset until the following morning. In point of
fact, the _pesah_ points back to the sacrifice of the firstlings
(Exodus xxxiv. 18 seq., xiii. 12 seq.; Deuteronomy xv. 19 seq., xvi.
1 seq.), and it is principally upon this that the historical
character of the whole festivity hinges. It is because Jehovah
smote the first-born of Egypt and spared those of Israel that the
latter thenceforward are held sacred to Him. Such is the
representation given not merely in the Priestly Code but also in
Exodus xiii. 11 seq. But in neither of its sources does the
Jehovistic tradition know anything of this. "Let my people go,
that they may keep a feast unto me in the wilderness with
sacrifices and cattle and sheep: "this from the first is the
demand made upon Pharaoh, and it is in order to be suitably
adorned for this purpose, contemplated by them from the first,
that the departing Israelites borrow festal robes and ornaments
from the Egyptians. Because Pharaoh refuses to allow the Hebrews
to offer to their God the firstlings of cattle that are His due,
Jebovah seizes from him the first-born of men. Thus the exodus is
not the occasion of the festival, but the festival the occasion, if
only a pretended one, of the exodus. If this relationship is
inverted in Exodus xiii, it is because that passage is not one of
the sources of the Jehovistic tradition, but is part of the
redaction, and in fact (as is plain from other reasons with regard
to the entire section xiii. 1-16) of a Deuteronomic redaction.
From this it follows that the elaboration of the historical motive
of the passover is not earlier than Deuteronomy, although perhaps a
certain inclination to that way of explaining it appears before
then, just as in the case of the _maccoth_ (Exodus xii. 34). What
has led to it is evidently the coincidence of the spring festival
with the exodus, already accepted by the older tradition, the
relation of cause and effect having become inverted in course of
time. The only view sanctioned by the nature of the case is that
the Israelite custom of offering the firstlings gave rise to the
narrative of the slaying of the first-born of Egypt; unless the
custom be pre-supposed the story is inexplicable, and the peculiar
selection of its victims by the plague is left without a motive.
The sacrifice of the first-born, of the male first-born, that is to
say--for the females were reared as with us--does not require an
historical explanation, but can be accounted for very simply: it
is the expression of thankfulness to the Deity for fruitful flocks
and herds. If claim is also laid to the human first-born, this is
merely a later generalisation which after all resolves itself
merely into a substitution of an animal offering and an extension
of the original sacrifice. In Exodus xx. 28, 29 and xxxiv. 19
this consequence does not yet seem to be deduced or even to be
suspected as possible; it first appears in xxxiv. 20 and presents
itself most distinctly in the latest passage (xiii. 12), for
there P+R RXM is contrasted with P+R #GR, and for the first the
expression H(BYR, a technical one in the time of Jeremiah and Ezekiel
for child sacrifice, is used. The view of some scholars (most
of them mere casual visitors in the field of Old Testament
research) that the slaying of the first-born male children was
originally precisely the main feature of the passover, hardly
deserves refutation. Like the other festivals, this also, apart
from the view taken of it in the Priestly Code, has a thoroughly
joyous character (Exodus x. 9); Deuteronomy xvi. 7; comp. Isaiah
xxx. 29). There are some historical instances indeed of the
surrender of an only child or of the dearest one, but always
as a voluntary and quite exceptional act; the contrary is not
proved by Hosea xiii. 2. /1/ The offering of
*******************************************
1. "They make them molten images of their silver, idols according
to their fancy. To them they speak, men doing sacrifice kiss calves!"
The prophet would hardly blame human sacrifices only thus incidentally,
more in ridicule than in high moral indignation; he would bring it
to prominence the horrible and revolting character of the action
much more than its absurdity. Thus ZBXY )DM means most probably,
"offerers belonging to the human race." At the same time, even if
the expression did mean "sacrificers of men," it would prove nothing
regarding regular sacrifices of children.
********************************************
human first-born was certainly no regular or commanded exaction in
ancient times; there are no traces of so enormous a blood tax,
but, on the contrary, many of a great preference for eldest sons.
It was not until shortly before the exile that the burning of
children was introduced on a grand scale along with many other
innovations, and supported by a strict interpretation of the
command regarding firstlings (Jeremiah vii. 31, xix. 5; Ezekiel xx.
26). In harmony with this is the fact that the law of Exodus
xiii. 3-16 comes from the hand of the latest redactor of the
Jehovistic history.
III.I.2. "Abel was a shepherd and Cain was a husbandman. And in
process of time it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit
of the ground an offering unto the Lord; and Abel also brought
an offering of the firstlings of his sheep."
It is out of the simplest, most natural, and most wide-spread
offerings, those of the first-fruits of the flock, herd, and
field, the occasions for which recur regularly with the seasons of
the year, that the annual festivals took their rise. The passover
corresponds with the firstlings of Abel the shepherd, the other
three with the fruits presented by Cain the husbandman; apart
from this difference, in essence and foundation they are all
precisely alike. Their connection with the _aparchai_ of the
*[first-fruits; firstlings for sacrifice or offering]*
yearly seasons is indeed assumed rather than expressly stated in
the Jehovistic and Deuteronomistic legislation. Yet in Exodus
xxiii. 17-19, xxxiv. 23-26 we read:
"Three times in the year shall all thy men appear before the Lord
Jehovah; thou shalt not mingle the blood of my sacrifice with leaven,
neither shall the fat of my sacrifice remain until the morning.
The best of the first-fruits of thy land shalt thou bring into the
house of Jehovah thy God; thou shalt not seethe the kid in the milk
of its mother."
It is forbidden to appear before Jehovah empty, hence the
connection between the first general sentence and the details
which follow it. Of these, the first seems to relate to the passover;
doubtless indeed it holds good of all animal sacrifices, but in point
of fact these are offered in preponderating numbers at the great
festival after the herds and flocks have produced their young.
The remaining sentences relate to the feasts of harvest and
ingathering, whose connection with the fruits of the field is
otherwise clear. As for Deuteronomy, there also it is required
on the one hand that the dues from the flock and herd and field
shall be personally offered at Jerusalem, and made the occasion
of joyous sacrificial feasts; on the other hand, that three
appearances in the year shall be made at Jerusalem, at Easter,
at Pentecost, and at the feast of tabernacles, and not with empty
hands. These requirements can only be explained on the assumption
that the material of the feasts was that furnished by the dues.
Clearly in Deuteronomy all three coincide; sacrifices, dues, feasts;
other sacrifices than those occasioned by the dues can hardly be
thought of for the purpose of holding a joyous festival before
Jehovah; the dues are, properly speaking, simply those sacrifices
prescribed by popular custom, and therefore fixed and festal,
of which alone the law has occasion to treat. /1/
*****************************************
1. Deuteronomy xii. 6 seq., 11 seq., xiv. 23-26, xvi. 7, 11, 14.
In the section xiv. 22-xvi. 17, dues and feasts are taken together.
In the first half (xiv. 22-xv. 18) there is a progression from those
acts which are repeated within the course of a year to those which
occur every three years, and finally to those which occur every seven;
in the second half (xv. 19-xvi. 17) recurrence is again made to the
principal, that is, the seasonal dues, first to the firstlings
and the passover feast, and afterwards to the two others, in
connection with which the tithes of the fruits are offered.
****************************************
It results from the very nature of the case that the people come
together to offer thanks for Jehovah's blessing, but no special
emphasis is laid upon this. In the Jehovistic legislation
(Exodus xxiii., xxxiv.) the terms have not yet come to be fixed,
so that it is hardly possible to speak of a "dies festus"
in the strict sense; festal seasons rather than festal days
are what we have. Easter is celebrated in the month Abib,
when the corn is in the ear (Exodus ix. 31, 32), Pentecost
when the wheat is cut, the autumn festival when the vintage
has been completed,--rather vague and shifting determinations.
Deuteronomy advances a step towards fixing the terms
and intervals more accurately, a circumstance very intimately
connected with the centralisation of the worship in Jerusalem.
Even here, however, we do not meet with one general festive
offering on the part of the community, but only with
isolated private offerings by individuals.
In correspondence with this the amount of the gifts is left with
considerable vagueness to the good-will of the offerers. Only the
firstlings are definitely demanded. The redemption allowed
in Deuteronomy by means of money which buys a substitute
in Jerusalem has no proper meaning for the earlier time;
yet even then the offerer may in individual instances have availed
himself of liberty of exchange, all the more because even then his
gift, as a sacrificial meal, was essentially a benefit to himself
(Exodus xxiii. 18; Genesis iv. 4, WMXBLHN). For the
first-fruits of the field Exodus prescribes no measure at all,
Deuteromony demands the tithe of corn, wine, and oil, which,
however, is not to be understood with mathematical strictness,
inasmuch as it is used at sacrificial meals, is not made over to a
second party, and thus does not require to be accounted for. The
tithe, as appears from Deuteronomy xxvi., is offered in autumn, that
is, at the feast of tabernacles; this is the proper autumn
festival of thanksgiving, not only for the wine harvest, but also
for that of the threshing-floor (xvi. 13); it demands seven days,
which must all be spent in Jerusalem, while in the case of maccoth
only one need be spent there. It is self-evident that there is no
restriction to the use of vegetable gifts merely, but sacrifices of
flesh are also assumed--purchased perhaps with the proceeds of the
sale of the tithe. In this way the special character of the
feasts, and their connection with the first-fruits peculiar to
them, could easily disappear, a thing which seems actually to
have occurred in Deuteronomy, and perhaps even earlier. It is not
to be wondered at that much should seem unclear to us which must
have been obvious to contemporaries; in Deuteronomy, moreover,
almost everything is left to standing custom, and only the one
main point insisted on, that the religious worship, and thus also
the festivals, must be celebrated only in Jerusalem. Leaving out
of account the passover, which originally had an independent
standing, and only afterwards through its connection with maccoth
was taken into the regular cycle of the _haggim_, it cannot be
doubted, generally speaking and on the whole, that not only in
the Jehovistic but also in the Deuteronomic legislation the
festivals rest upon agriculture, the basis at once of life and of
religion. The soil, the fruitful soil, is the object of religion;
it takes the place alike of heaven and of hell. Jehovah gives the
land and its produce; He receives the best of what it yields as an
expression of thankfulness, the tithes in recognition of His
seigniorial right. The relation between Himself and His people
first arose from His having given them the land in fee; it continues
to be maintained, inasmuch as good weather and fertility come from Him.
It is in Deuteronomy that one detects the first very perceptible
traces of a historical dress being given to the religion
and the worship, but this process is still confined within modest
limits. The historical event to which recurrence is always made
is the bringing up of Israel out of Egypt, and this is significant
in so far as the bringing up out of Egypt coincides with the leading
into Canaan, that is, with the giving of the land, so that the
historical motive again resolves itself into the natural. In this
way it can be said that not merely the Easter festival but all
festivals are dependent upon the introduction of Israel into Canaan,
and this is what we actually find very clearly in the prayer
(Deuteronomy xxvi.) with which at the feast of tabernacles
the share of the festal gifts falling to the priest is offered
to the Deity. A basket containing fruits is laid upon the altar,
and the following words are spoken:
"A wandering Aramaean was my father, and he went down into Egypt
and sojourned there, a few men strong, and became there a nation,
great, mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians evil-entreated them
and oppressed them, and laid upon them hard bondage. Then called
we upon ]ehovah the God of our fathers, and He heard our voice and
looked on our affliction and our labour and our oppression. And
Jehovah brought us forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand, and
with an outstretched arm, and with great terribleness, and with
signs and with wonders, _and brought us unto this place, and gave us
this land, a land where milk and honey flow!. And now, behold, I
have brought the best of the fruits of the land, which thou, O
Lord, hast given me._"
Observe here how the act of salvation whereby Israel was founded
issues in the gift of a fruitful land.
III.II. With this account of the Jehovistic-Deuteronomistic legislation
harmonises the pre-exilic practice so far as that can be traced or
is borne witness to in the historical and prophetical books.
Ancient festivals in Israel must have had the pastoral life as
their basis; only the passover therefore can be regarded as
belonging, to the number of these. /1/ It is
*********************************************
1. The ancient Arabs also observed the sacrifice of
the firstlings as a solemnity in the sacred month Rajab, which
originally fell in spring (comp. Ewald, Ztschr. f.d. Kunde
des Morgenlandes, 1840, p. 419; Robertson Smith, Prophets,
p. 383 sq). A festivity mentioned among the earliest, and that
for pastoral Judah, is the sheep-shearing (1Samuel xxv. 2 seq.;
Genesis xxxviii. 12); but it does not appear to have ever developed
into a regular and independent festival. _Aparchai_ of wool and
flax are mentioned in Hosea (ii. 7, 11 [A.V. 5, 9]) as of wool
alone in Deuteronomy (xviii. 4).
*********************************************
with perfect accuracy accordingly that precisely the passover is
postulated as having been the occasion of the exodus, as being a
sacrificial feast that has to be celebrated in the wilderness and
has nothing to do with agriculture or harvest. But it is curious
to notice how little prominence is afterwards given to this
festival, which from the nature of the case is the oldest of all.
It cannot have been known at all to the Book of the Covenant, for
there (Exodus xxii. 29, 30) the command is to leave the firstling
seven days with its dam and on the eighth day to give it to
Jehovah. Probably through the predominance gained by agriculture
and the feasts founded on it the passover fell into disuse in many
parts of Israel, and kept its ground only in districts where the
pastoral and wilderness life still retained its importance. This
would also explain why the passover first comes clearly into
light when Judah alone survives after the fall of Samaria. In
2Kings xxiii. 21 seq. we are told that in the eighteenth year of
King Josiah the passover was held according to the precept of the
law (Deut xvi.), and that for the first time,--never until then from
the days of the Judges had it been so observed. If in this passage
the novelty of the institution is so strongly insisted on, the
reference is less to the essence of the thing than to the manner of
celebration as enjoined in Deuteronomy. Agriculture was learned by
the Hebrews from the Canaanites in whose land they settled, and
in commingling with whom they, during the period of the Judges,
made the transition to a sedentary life. Before the metamorphosis
of shepherds into peasants was effected, they could not possibly
have had feasts which related to agriculture. It would have been
very strange if they had not taken them also over from the
Canaanites. The latter owed the land and its fruits to Baal, and
for this they paid him the due tribute; the Israelites stood in
the same relation to Jehovah. Materially and in itself, the act
was neither heathenish nor Israelite; its character either way
was determined by its destination. There was, therefore, nothing
against a transference of the feasts from Baal to Jehovah; on the
contrary, the transference was a profession of faith that the land
and its produce, and thus all that lay at the foundations of the
national existence, were due not to the heathen deity but to the
God of Israel. The earliest testimony is that which we have to the
existence of the vintage festival in autumn,--in the first instance
as a custom of the Canaanite population of Shechem. In the old and
instructive story of Abimelech the son of Jerubbaal we are told
(Judges ix. 27) of the citizens of Shechem that "they went out
into the fields, and gathered their vineyards, and trode the grapes,
and celebrated _hillulim_, and went into the house of their god, and
ate and drank, and cursed Abimelech." But this festival must also
have taken root among the Israelites at a tolerably early period.
According to Judges xxi. 19 seq. there was observed yearly at
Shiloh in the vineyards a feast to Jehovah, at which the maidens
went out to dance. Even if the narrative of Judges xix. seq. be
as a whole untrustworthy as history, this does not apply to the
casual trait just mentioned, especially as it is confirmed by
1Samuel i. In this last-cited passage a feast at Shiloh is also
spoken of, as occurring at the end of the year, that is, in autumn
at the time of the _asiph_, /1/ and as being an attraction to pilgrims
*********************************************
1. LTQPT HYMYM (i.e., at the new year) 1Samuel i. 20; Exodus
xxxiv. 22. In this sense is also to be understood MYMYM YMYMH
Judges xxi. 19, 1Samuel i. 3. Comp. Zechariah xiv. 16.
**********************************************
from the neighbourhood. Obviously the feast does not occur in all
places at once, but at certain definite places (in Ephraim) which
then influence the surrounding district. The thing is connected
with the origin of larger sanctuaries towards the end of the period
of the Judges, or, more properly speaking, with their being taken
over from the previous inhabitants; thus, for example, on Shechem
becoming an Israelite town the _hillulim_ were no more abolished than
was the sanctuary itself. Over and above this the erection of
great royal temples must have exerted an important influence.
Alike at Jerusalem and at Bethel "the feast" was celebrated from
the days of Solomon and Jeroboam just as previously at Shechem and
Shiloh, in the former place in September, in the latter perhaps
somewhat later. /2/
********************************************
2. 1Kings xii. 32 is, it must be owned, far from trustworthy.
1Kings viii. 2 is difficult to harmonise with vi. 38, if the
interpretation of Bul and Ethanim is correct.
********************************************
This was at that period the sole actual _panegyris_. [national festivall
The feasts at the beginning of summer may indeed also have been
observed at this early period (Isa ix. 2), but in smaller local
circles. This distinction is still discernible in Deuteronomy, for
although in that book the feast of tabernacles is not theoretically
higher than the others, in point of fact it alone is observed from
beginning to end at the central sanctuary, while Easter, on the
other hand, is for the most part kept at home, being only during
the first day observed at Jerusalem; moreover, the smaller demand
is much more emphatically insisted on than the larger, so that the
first seems to have been an innovation, the latter to have had the
sanction of older custom. Amos and Hosea, presupposing as they do
a splendid cultus and great sanctuaries, doubtless also knew of a
variety of festivals, but they have no occasion to mention any
one by name. More definite notices occur in Isaiah. The
threatening that within a year's time the Assyrians will be in the
land is thus (xxix. 1) given: "Add ye year to year, let the
feasts come round, yet I will distress Jerusalem," and at the
close of the same discourse the prophet expresses himself as
follows (xxxii. 9 seq.):
"Rise up, ye women that are at ease; hear my voice, ye careless
daughters; give ear unto my speech. Days upon a year shall ye
be troubled, ye careless women; for the vintage shall fail,
the ingathering shall not come. Ye shall smite upon the breasts,
for the pleasant fields, for the fruitful vine."
When the two passages are taken together we gather that Isaiah,
following the universal custom of the prophets in coming forward
at great popular gatherings, is here speaking at the time of the
autumn festival, in which the women also took an active part
(Judges xxi. 19 seq.). But this autumn festival, the joyous and
natural character of which is unmistakably revealed, takes place
with him at the change of the year, as may be inferred from a
comparison between the YNQPW of xxix. I, and the TQPT of Exodus
xxxiv. 22, 1Samuel i. 20, and closes a cycle of festivals here
for the first time indicated.
2. The preceding survey, it must be admitted, scarcely seems fully
to establish the alleged agreement between the Jehovistic law
and the older praxis. Names are nowhere to be found, and in point
of fact it is only the autumn festival that is well attested,
and this, it would appear, as the only festival, as THE feast.
And doubtless it was also the oldest and most important of the
harvest festivals, as it never ceased to be the concluding
solemnity of the year. What has been prosperously brought to
close is what people celebrate most rightly; the conclusion of the
ingathering, both of the threshing and of the vintage, is the most
appropriate of all occasions for a great joint festival,--for this
additional reason, that the term is fixed, not, as in the case of
the joy of reaping, by nature alone, but is in man's hands and
can be regulated by him. Yet even under the older monarchy the
previous festivals must also have already existed as well (Isaiah
xxix. 1). The peculiarity of the feast of tabernacles would then
reduce itself to this, that it was the only general festival at
Jerusalem and Bethel; local celebrations "at all threshing floors
"--i.e., on all high places--are not thereby excluded (Host ix. 1).
But the Jehovistic legislation makes no distinction of local and
central, for it ignores the great temples throughout. /1/ Possibly,
**************************************
1. Exodus xx. 24-26 looks almost like a protest against the arrangements
of the temple of Solomon,--especially ver. 26.
**************************************
also, it to some extent systematises the hitherto somewhat vaguer
custom; the transition from the _aparchai_ to a feast was perhaps in
practice still somewhat incomplete. In the paucity of positive
data one is justified, however, in speaking of a substantial
agreement, inasmuch as in the two cases the idea of the festivals
is the same. Very instructive in this respect are two sections of
Hosea (chaps. ii. and ix.), which on this account deserve to be
fully gone into. In the first of these Israel is figured as a
woman who receives her maintenance from her husband, that is, from
the Deity; this is the basis of the covenant relationship. But
she falls into error as to the giver of her meat and drink and
clothing, supposing them to come from the idols, and not from
Jehovah.
"She hath said, I will go after my lovers, who give me
my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my
drink. Doth she then not know that it is I (Jehovah) who have
given her the corn and the wine and the oil, and silver in
abundance, and gold--out of which she maketh false gods? Therefore
will I take back again my corn in its time, and my wine in its
season, and I will take away my wool and my flax that should
cover her nakedness; and now will I discover her shame before the
eyes of her lovers, and none shall deliver her out of my hand.
And I will bring all her mirth to an end, her festival days, her
new moons and her sabbaths, and all her solemn feasts. And I will
destroy her vines and her fig-trees whereof she saith, 'They are
my hire, that my lovers have given me,' and I will make them a
wilderness, and the beasts of the field shall eat them. Thus will
I visit upon her the days of the false gods, wherein she burnt
fat offerings to them and decked herself with her rings
and her jewels, and went after her lovers and forget me,
saith the Lord. Therefore, behold, I will allure her and bring her
into the wilderness, and there I will assign her her vineyards:
then shall she be docile as in her youth, and as in the day
when she came up out of the land of Egypt. Thereafter I
betroth thee unto me anew for ever, in righteousness and in
judgment, in loving kindness and in mercies. In that day, saith
the Lord, will I answer the heavens, and they shall answer the
earth, and the earth shall answer the corn and the wine and the
oil, and these shall answer Jezreel" (ii. 7-24 [5-22]).
The blessing of the land is here the end of religion, and that
quite generally,--alike of the false heathenish and of the true
Israelitish. /1/
*********************************************
1. Comp. Zech. xiv. 16 seq. All that are left of the nations
which came against Jerusalem shall go up from year to year to
worship Jehovah of hosts and to keep the feast of tabernacles.
And whoso of the families of the earth shall not come up unto
Jerusalem to worship Jehovah of hosts, UPON THEM SHALL BE NO RAIN,.
But for the Egyptians--who on account of the Nile are independent
of rain--another punishment is threatened if they do not come to
keep the feast of tabernacles.
**********************************************
It has for its basis no historical acts of salvation,
but nature simply, which, however, is regarded only as God's
domain and as man's field of labour, and is in no manner itself
deified. The land is Jehovah's house (viii. 1, ix. 15), wherein
He lodges and entertains the nation; in the land and through the
land it is that Israel first becomes the people of Jehovah, just
as a marriage is constituted by the wife's reception into the
house of the husband, and her maintenance there. And as divorce
consists in the wife's dismissal from the house, so is Jehovah's
relation to His people dissolved by His making the land into a
wilderness, or as in the last resort by His actually driving them
forth into the wilderness; He restores it again by "sowing the
nation into the land" anew, causing the heavens to give rain and
the earth to bear, and thereby bringing into honour the name of
"God sown" for Israel (ii. 25 [23]). In accordance with this'
worship consists simply of the thanksgiving due for the gifts of
the soil, the vassalage payable to the superior who has given the
land and its fruits. It _ipso facto_ ceases when the corn and wine
cease; in the wilderness it cannot be thought of, for if God
bestows nothing then man cannot rejoice, and religious worship is
simply rejoicing over blessings bestowed. It has, therefore,
invariably and throughout the character given in the Jehovistic
legislation to the feasts, in which also, according to Hosea's
description, it culminates and is brought to a focus. For the days
of the false gods, on which people adorned themselves and
sacrificed, are just the feasts, and in fact the feasts of
Jehovah, whom however the people worshipped by images, which the
prophet regards as absolutely heathenish.
Equally instructive is the second passage (ix. 1-6).
"Rejoice not too loudly, O Israel, like the heathen, that thou
hast gone a whoring from thy God, and lovest the harlot's hire
upon every threshing-floor. The floor and the wine-press shall
not feed them, and the new wine shall fail them. They shall not
dwell in Jehovah's land; Ephraim must return to Egypt, and eat
what is unclean in Assyria. Then shall they no more pour out
wine to Jehovah, or set in order sacrifices to Him; like bread of
mourners is their bread, /1/ all that eat thereof become unclean, for
**************************************
1. For Y(RBW (ix. 4) read Y(RKW, and LXMM for LXM. See Kuenen,
National Religions and Universal Religions (1882), p. 312 seq.
**************************************
their bread shall only be for their hunger, it shall not come
into the house of the Lord. What will ye do in the day of
festival and in the day of the feast of the Lord? For lo, after
they have gone away from among the ruins, Egypt shall keep hold
of them, Memphis shall bury them; their pleasant things of
silver shall nettles possess, the thornbush shall be in their
tents."
It need not surprise us that here again the prophet places
the worship which in intention is obviously meant for Jehovah on
the same footing with the heathen worship which actually has
little to distinguish it externally therefrom, being constrained
to regard the "pleasant things of silver" in the tents in the
high places not as symbols of Jehovah, but as idols, and their
worship as whoredom. Enough that once more we have a clear view
of the character of the popular worship in Israel at that period.
Threshing-floor and wine-press, corn and wine, are its
motives,--vociferous joy, merry shoutings, its expression. All the
pleasure of life is concentrated in the house of Jehovah at the
joyous banquets held to celebrate the coming of the gifts of His
mild beneficence; no more dreadful thought than that a man must
eat his bread like unclean food, like bread of mourners, without
having offered the _aparchai_ at the festival. /2/ It is this
***********************************************
2. Times of mourning are, so to speak, times of interdict, during
which intercourse between God and man is suspended. Further,
nothing at all was ever eaten except that of which God had in the
first instance received His share;--not only no flesh but also no
vegetable food, for the "first-fruits" of corn and wine
represented the produce of the year and sanctified the whole. All
else was unclean. Comp. Ezekiel iv. 13.
**********************************************
thought which gives its sting to the threatened exile; for
sacrifice and feast are dependent upon the land, which is the
nursing-mother and the settled home of the nation, the foundation
of its existence and of its worship.
The complete harmony of this with the essential character of the
worship and of the festivals in the Book of the Covenant, in the
law of the Two Tables, and in Deuteronomy, is clear in itself,
but becomes still more evident by a comparison with the Priestly
Code, to which we now proceed.
III.III.
In the Priestly Code the festal cycle is dealt with in two
separate passages (Leviticus xxiii; Numbers xxviii., xxix.),
of which the first contains a fragment (xxiii. 9-22, and partly
also xxiii. 39-44) not quite homogeneous with the kernel of the
document. In both these accounts also the three great feasts
occur, but with considerable alteration of their essential
character.
III.III.1. The festal celebration, properly so called, is exhausted
by a prescribed joint offering. There are offered (I.) during
Easter week and also on the day of Pentecost, besides the _tamid_,
two bullocks, one ram, seven lambs as a burnt-offering, and one
he-goat as a sin-offering daily; (2.) at the feast of
tabernacles, from the first to the seventh day two rams, fourteen
lambs, and, in descending series, from thirteen to seven bullocks;
on the eighth day one bullock, one ram, seven lambs as a
burnt offering, besides one he-goat daily as a sin-offering.
Additional voluntary offerings on the part of individuals are not
excluded, but are treated as of secondary importance. Elsewhere,
alike in the older practice (1Samuel i. 4 seq.) and in the law
(Exodus xxiii. 18) it is precisely the festal offering that is a
sacrificial meal, that is to say, a private sacrifice. In
Deuteronomy it has been possible to find anything surprising in
the joyous meals only because people are wont to know their Old
Testament merely through the perspective of the Priestly Code;
at most the only peculiar thing in that book is a certain humane
application of the festal offering, the offerer being required to
invite to it the poor and landless of his acquaintance. But this
is a development which harmonises much more with the old idea of
an offering as a communion between God and man than does the other
self-sufficing general churchly sacrifice. The passover alone
continues in the Priestly Code also to be a sacrificial meal, and
participation therein to be restricted to the family or a limited
society. But this last remnant of the old custom shows itself here
as a peculiar exception; the festival in the house instead of
"before Jehovah " has also something ambiguous about it, and turns
the sacrifice into an entirely profane act of slaughtering
almost--until we come to the rite of expiation, which is
characteristically retained (Exodus xii. 7; comp. Ezekiel xiv. 19).
Of a piece with this is the circumstance that the "first-fruits"
of the season have come to be separated from the festivals still
more than had been previously the case. While in Deuteronomy
they are still offered at the three great sacrificial meals in
the presence of Jehovah, in the Priestly Code they have
altogether ceased to be offerings at all, and thus also of course
have ceased to be festal offerings, being merely dues payable to
the priests (by whom they are in part collected) and not in any
case brought before the altar. Thus the feasts entirely lose
their peculiar characteristics, the occasions by which they are
inspired and distinguished; by the monotonous sameness of the
unvarying burnt-offering and sin-offering of the community as a
whole they are all put on the same even level, deprived of their
natural spontaneity, and degraded into mere "exercises of
religion." Only some very slight traces continue to bear witness
to, we might rather say, to betray, what was the point from which
the development started, namely, the rites of the barley sheaf,
the loaves of bread, and the booths (Leviticus xxiii.). But these
are mere rites, petrified remains of the old custom; the actual
first-fruits belonging to the owners of the soil are collected by
the priests, the shadow of them is retained at the festival in the
form of the sheaf offered by the whole community--a piece of
symbolism which has now become quite separated from its connection
and is no longer understood. And since the giving of thanks for
the fruits of the field has ceased to have any substantial place
in the feasts, the very shadow of connection between the two also
begins to disappear, for the rites of Leviticus xxiii. are taken
over from an older legislation, and for the most part are passed
over in silence in Numbers xxviii., xxix. Here, again, the passover
has followed a path of its own. Even at an earlier period,
substitution of other cattle and sheep was permitted. But now in
the Priestly Code the firstlings are strictly demanded indeed,
but merely as dues, not as sacrifices; the passover, always a
yearling lamb or kid, has neither in fact nor in time anything to
do with them, but occupies a separate position alongside. But as
it is represented to have been instituted in order that the Hebrew
first born may be spared in the destruction of those of the Egyptians,
this connection betrays the fact that the yearling lambs are after
all only a substitute for the firstlings of all animals fit for
sacrifice, but in comparison with the cattle and sheep of the
Jehovistic tradition and Deuteronomy a secondary substitute, and
one for the uniformity of which there is no motive; and we see
further that if the firstlings are now over and above assigned to
the priests this is equivalent to a reduplication, which has been
made possible first by a complete obscuration, and afterwards
by an artificial revival of the original custom.
A further symptom also proper to be mentioned here is the fixing of
harvest festival terms by the days of the month, which is to be
found exclusively in the Priestly Code. Easter falls upon the
fifteenth, that is, at full moon, of the first, the feast of
tabernacles upon the same day of the seventh month; Pentecost,
which, strange to say, is left undetermined in Numbers xxviii.,
falls, according to Leviticus xxiii., seven weeks after Easter.
This definite dating points not merely to a fixed and uniform
regulation of the cultus, but also to a change in its contents.
For it is not a matter of indifference that according to the
Jehovistic-Deuteronomic legislation Easter is observed in "the
month of corn ears" when the sickle is put to the corn, Pentecost
at the end of the wheat harvest, and the feast of tabernacles
after the ingathering; as harvest feasts they are from their
very nature regulated by the condition of the fruits of the soil.
When they cease to be so, when they are made to depend upon the
phases of the moon, this means that their connection with their
natural occasion is being lost sight of. Doubtless the accurate
determination of dates is correlated with the other circumstance
that the festivals are no longer kept in an isolated way by
people at any place they may choose, but by the whole united
nation at a single spot. It is therefore probable that the fixing
of the date w as accomplished at first in the case of the autumn
festival, which was the first to divest itself of its local
character and most readily suffered a transposition of a week or
two. It was hardest to change in the case of the _maccoth_
festival; the putting of the sickle to the corn is very
inconvenient to shift. But here the passover seems to have
exerted an influence. For the passover is indeed an annual feast,
but not by the nature of things connected with any particular
season of the year; rather was it dependent originally on the
phases of the moon. Its character as a _pannychis_ [vigil]
(Exodus xii. 42 [LYL #MWRYM]) points in this direction,
as also does the analogy of the Arab feasts.
The verification of the alleged denaturalisation of the feasts
in the Priestly Code lies in this, that their historical
interpretation, for which the way is already paved by the
Jehovistic tradition, here attains its full development. For
after they have lost their original contents and degenerated into
mere prescribed religious forms, there is nothing to prevent the
refilling of the empty bottles in any way accordant with the
tastes of the period. Now, accordingly, the feast of tabernacles
also becomes historical (Leviticus xxiii.), instituted to commemorate
the booths under which the people had to shelter themselves during
the forty years of wandering in the wilderness. In the case of
Easter a new step in advance is made beyond the assignation of its
motive to the exodus, which is already found in Deuteronomy and
in Exodus xiii. 3 seq. For in the Priestly Code this feast,
which precisely on account of its eminently historical character
is here regarded as by far the most important of all, is much
more than the mere commemoration of a divine act of salvation, it
is itself a saving deed. It is not because Jehovah smote the
firstborn of Egypt that the passover is afterwards instituted on
the contrary, it is instituted beforehand, at the moment of the
exodus, in order that the firstborn of Israel may be spared.
Thus not merely is a historical motive assigned for the custom;
its beginning is itself raised to the dignity of a historical
fact upon which the feast rests,--the shadow elsewhere thrown only
by another historical event here becomes substantial and casts
itself. The state of matters in the case of the unleavened cakes
is very similar. Instead of having it as their occasion and object
to keep in remembrance the hasty midnight departure in which the
travellers were compelled to carry with them their dough
unleavened as it was (Exodus xii. 34), in the Priestly Code they
also are spoken of as having being enjoined beforehand (xii. 15
seq.), and thus the festival is celebrated in commemoration of
itself; in other words, not merely is a historical motive
assigned to it, it is itself made a historical fact. For this
reason also, the law relating to Easter is removed from all
connection with the tabernacle legislation (Exodus xii. 1 seq.),
and the difficuity that now in the case of the passover the
sanctuary which elsewhere in the Priestly Code is indispensable
must be left out of sight is got over by divesting it as much as
possible of its sacrificial character. /1/
*******************************************
1. The ignoring of the sanctuary has a reason only in the case of
the first passover, and perhaps ought to be regarded as holding
good for that only. The distinction between the PSX MCRYM and
the PSX HDWRWT is necessary, if only for the reason that the former
is a historical fact, the latter a commemorative observance.
When it is argued for the originality of the passover ritual
in the Priestly Code that it alone fits in with the conditions
of the sojourn in Egypt, the position is not to be disputed.
*******************************************
In the case of Pentecost alone is there no tendency to historical
explanation; that in this instance has been reserved for later
Judaism, which from the chronology of the Book of Exodus
discerned in the feast a commemoration of the giving of the law at
Sinai. But one detects the drift of the later time.
It has been already pointed out, in what has just been said, that
as regards this development the centralisation of the cultus was
epochmaking. Centralisation is synonymous with generalisation
and fixity, and these are the external features by which
the festivals of the Priestly Code are distinguished from those
which preceded them. In evidence I point to the prescribed
sacrifice of the community instead of the spontaneous sacrifice
of the individual, to the date fixed for the 15th of the month,
to the complete separation between sacrifices and dues, to the
reduction of the passover to uniformity; nothing is free or the
spontaneous growth of nature, nothing is indefinite and still
in process of becoming; all is statutory, sharply defined,
distinct. But the centralisation of the cultus had also not
a little to do with the inner change which the feasts underwent.
At first the gifts of the various seasons of the year are offered
by the individual houses as each one finds convenient; afterwards
they are combined, and festivals come into existence; last of all,
the united offerings of individuals fall into the back ground when
compared with the single joint-offering on behalf of the entire
community. According as stress is laid upon the common character
of the festival and uniformity in its observance, in precisely the
same degree does it become separated from the roots from which it
sprang, and grow more and more abstract. That it is then very
ready to assume a historical meaning may partly also be attributed
to the circumstance that history is not, like harvest, a personal
experience of individual households, but rather an experience of
the nation as a whole. One does not fail to observe, of course,
that the festivals--which always to a certain degree have a
centralising tendency--have IN THEMSELVES a disposition to become
removed from the particular motives of their institution, but in
no part of the legislation has this gone so far as in the Priestly
Code. While everywhere else they still continue to stand, as
we have seen, in a clear relationship to the land and its increase,
and are at one and the same time the great days of homage and
tribute for the superior and grantor of the soil, here this
connection falls entirely out of sight. As in opposition to the
Book of the Covenant and Deuteronomy, nay, even to the corpus
itself which forms the basis of Leviticus xvii.-xxvi., one can
characterise the entire Priestly Code as the wilderness
legislation, inasmuch as it abstracts from the natural conditions
and motives of the actual life of the people in the land of Canaan
and rears the hierocracy on the _tabula rasa_ of the wilderness, the
negation of nature, by means of the bald statutes of arbitrary
absolutism, so also the festivals, in which the connection of the
cultus with agriculture appears most strongly, have as much as
possible been turned into wilderness festivals, but most of all
the Easter festival, which at the same time has become the most
important.
III.III.2. The centralisation of the cultus, the revolutionising
influence of which is seen in the Priestly Code, is begun by Deuteronomy.
The former rests upon the latter, and draws its as yet unsuspected
consequences. This general relation is maintained also in
details; in the first place, in the names of the feasts, which are
the same in both,--_pesah, shabuoth, sukkoth_. This is not without
its inner significance, for _asiph_ (ingathering) would have placed
much greater hindrances in the way of the introduction of a
historical interpretation than does sukkoth (booths). So also
with the prominence given to the passover, a festival mentioned
nowhere previously--a prominence which is much more striking in the
Priestly Code than in Deuteronomy. Next, this relation is
observed in the duration of the feasts. While Deuteronomy
certainly does not fix their date of commencement with the same
definiteness, it nevertheless in this respect makes a great
advance upon the Jehovistic legislation, inasmuch as it lays down
the rule of a week for Easter and Tabernacles, and of a day for
Pentecost. The Priestly Code is on the whole in agreement with
this, and also with the time determination of the relation of
Pentecost to Easter, but its provisions are more fully developed
in details. The passover, in the first month, on the evening of
the 14th, here also indeed begins the feast, but does not, as in
Deuteronomy xvi. 4, 8, count as the first day of Easter week;
on the contrary, the latter does not begin until the 15th and
closes with the 21st (comp. Leviticus xxiii. 6; Numbers xxviii. 17;
Exodus xii. 18). The beginning of the festival week being
thus distinctly indicated, there arises in this way not merely
an ordinary but also an extra-ordinary feast day more, the day
after the passover, on which already, according to the injunctions
of Deuteronomy, the pilgrims were required to set out early in the
morning on the return journey to their homes. /1/
*********************************************
1. It is impossible to explain away this discrepancy by the
circumstance that in the Priestly Code the day is reckoned from
the evening; for (1.) this fact has no practical bearing, as the
dating reckons at any rate from the morning, and the evening
preceding the 15th is always called the 14th of the month (Leviticus
xiii. 27, 32); (2.) the first day of the feast in Deuteronomy
is just the day on the evening of which the passover is held, and
upon it there follow not seven but six days more, whereas in the
Priestly Code the celebration extends from the 14th to the 21st of
the month (Exodus xii. 18). When the MXRT H#BT: is made to
refer, not as in Josh. v. 11 to the 14th, but as in Jewish
tradition (LXX on Leviticus xxiii. 11) to the day following the
15th of Nisan, thee 16th of Nisan is added to the 14th and 15th
as a special feast day.
***********************************************
Another advance consists in this, that not only the passover,
as in Deuteronomy, or the additional first day of the feast besides,
but also the seventh (which, according to Deuteronomy xvi. 8,
is marked only by rest), must be observed as _miqra qodesh_ in
Jerusalem. In other words, such pilgrims as do not live in the
immediate neighbourhood are compelled to pass the whole week there,
an exaction which enables us to mark the progress made with
centralisation, when the much more moderate demands of Deuteronomy
are compared. The feast of tabernacles is in the latter law also
observed from beginning to end at Jerusalem, but the Priestly Code
has contrived to add to it an eighth day as an _`acereth_ to the
principal feast, which indeed still appears to be wanting in the
older portion of Leviticus xxiii. From all this it is indisputable
that the Priestly Code has its nearest relations with Deuteronomy,
but goes beyond it in the same direction as that in which Deuteronomy
itself goes beyond the Jehovistic legislation. In any case the
intermediate place in the series belongs to Deuteronomy, and if
we begin that series with the Priestly Code, we must in consistency
close it with the Sinaitic Book of the Covenant (Exodus xx. 23 seq.).
After King Josiah had published Deuteronomy and had made it the
Book of the Covenant by a solemn engagement of the people (621
B.C.), he commanded them to "keep the passover to Jehovah your God
as it is written in this Book;" such a passover had never been
observed from the days of the judges, or throughout the entire
period of the kings (2Kings xxiii. 21, 22). And when Ezra the
scribe introduced the Pentateuch as we now have it as the
fundamental law of the church of the second temple (444 B.C.), it
was found written in the Torah which Jehovah had commanded by
Moses, that the children of Israel were to live in booths during
the feast in the seventh month, and further, to use branches
of olive and myrtle and palm for this purpose, and that the people
went and made to themselves booths accordingly; such a thing had
not been done "since the days of Joshua the son of Nun even unto
that day " (Nehemiah viii. 14 seq.). That Josiah's passover rests
upon Deuteronomy xvi. and not upon Exodus xii. is sufficiently
proved by the circumstance that the observance of the festival
stands in connection with the new unity of the cultus, and is
intended to be an exemplification of it, while the precept of
Exodus xii., if literally followed, could only have served to
destroy it. We thus find that the two promulgations of the law,
so great in their importance and so like one another in their
character, both take place at the time of a festival, the one
in spring, the other in harvest; and we also discover that the
festal observance of the Priestly Code first began to show life
and to gain currency about two hundred years later than that
of Deuteronomy. This can be proved in yet another way. The author
of the Book of Kings knows only of a seven days' duration
of the feast of tabernacles (1Kings viii. 66); Solomon dismisses
the people on the eighth day. On the other hand, in the parallel
passage in Chronicles (2Chronicles vii. 9) the king holds
the _`acereth_ on the eighth, and does not dismiss the people until
the following day, the twenty-third of the month; that is to say,
the Deuteronomic use, which is followed by the older author and
by Ezekiel (xiv. 25) who was, roughly speaking, his
contemporary, is corrected by the later writer into conformity
with that of the Priestly Code in force since the time of Ezra
(Nehemiah viii. 18). In later Judaism the inclination to assert
most strongly precisely that which is most open to dispute led
to the well-known result that the eighth day of the feast was
regarded as the most splendid of all (John vii. 37).
On this question also the Book of Ezekiel stands nearest the
Priestly Code, ordaining as follows (xiv. 21-25):--
"In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, ye shall
keep the passover, ye shall eat maccoth seven days; on that day
shall the prince offer for himself and for all the people of the
land a bullock for a sin-offering, and during the seven days
he shall offer a burnt-offering to the Lord, seven bullocks
and seven rams daily for the seven days, and a he-goat daily
for a sin offering; and he shall offer as a meal-offering an ephah
for every bullock and every ram and a hin of oil for the ephah.
In the seventh month, on the fifteenth day of the month, in the
feast shall he do the like for seven days, according to the
sin-offering, according to the burnt-offering, and according
to the meal-offering, and according to the oil."
Here indeed in details hardly any point is in agreement with the
prescriptions of the ritual law of Leviticus xxiii., Numbers xxviii.,
xxix. Apart from the fact that the day of Pentecost is omitted
(it is restored in the Massoretic text by an absurd correction
in ver. 11), in the first place there is a discrepancy as to the
DURATION of the feasts; both last seven and not eight days,
and the passover is taken for the first day of Easter, as in
Deuteronomy. Further, the offerings differ, alike by their
never-varying number and by their quality; in particular,
nothing is said of the passover lamb, but a bullock as a
general sin-offering is mentioned instead. From the _minha_ the
wine is wanting, but this must be left out of the account, for
Ezekiel banishes wine from the service on principle. Lastly, it
is not the CONGREGATION that sacrifices, but the prince for
himself and for the PEOPLE. But in spite of all differences the
general similarity is apparent; one sees that here for the first
time we have something which at all points admits of correlation
with the Priestly Code, but is quite disparate with the
Jehovistic legislation, and half so with that of Deuteronomy.
On both hands we find the term fixed according to the day
of the month, the strictly prescribed joint burnt-offering
and sin-offering, the absence of relation first-fruits
and agriculture, the obliteration of natural distinctions so as
to make one general churchly festival. But Ezekiel surely could
hardly have had any motive for reproducing Leviticus xxiii. and Numbers
xxviii. seq., and still less for the introduction of a number of
aimless variations as he did so. Let it be observed that in no
one detail does he contradict Deuteronomy, while yet he stands so
infinitely nearer to the Priestly Code; the relationship is not
an arbitrary one, but arises from their place in time. Ezekiel is
the forerunner of the priestly legislator in the Pentateuch; his
pence and people, to some extent invested with the colouring of
the bygone period of the monarchy, are the antecedents of the
congregation of the tabernacle and the second temple. Against
this supposition there is nothing to be alleged, and it is the
rational one, for this reason, that it was not Ezekiel but the
Priestly Code that furnished the norm for the praxis of the later
period.
For, as the festival system of the Priestly Code absolutely
refuses to accommodate itself to the manner of the older worship as
we are made acquainted with it in Hos. ii., ix. and elsewhere,
in the same degree does it furnish in every respect the standard
for the praxis of post-exilian Judaism, and, therefore, also for
our ideas thence derived. No one in reading the New Testament
dreams of any other manner of keeping the passover than that
of Exodus xii., or of any other offering than the paschal lamb
there prescribed. One might perhaps hazard the conjecture that
if in the wilderness legislation of the Code there is no trace
of agriculture being regarded as the basis of life, which it still
is in Deuteronomy and even in the kernel of Leviticus xvii.-xxvi.,
this also is a proof that the Code belongs to a very recent rather
than to a very early period, when agriculture was no longer rather
than not yet. With the Babylonian captivity the Jews lost their
fixed seats, and so became a trading people.
III.III.3. No notice has as yet been taken of one phenomenon which
distinguishes the Priestly Code, namely, that in it the
tripartite cycle of the feasts is extended and interrupted. In
the chronologically arranged enumeration of Leviticus xxiii.
and Numbers xxviii., xxix., two other feast days are interpolated
between Pentecost and Tabernacles: new year on the first, and the
great day of atonement on the tenth of the seventh month. One
perceives to what an extent the three originally connected
harvest feasts have lost their distinctive character, when it is
observed that these two heterogeneous days make their appearance in
the midst of them;--the _yom kippur_ in the same series with the
old _haggim_, i.e., dances, which were occasions of pure pleasure
and joy, not to be named in the same day with fasts and mournings.
The following points demand notice in detail.
In the period of the kings the change of the year occurred in
autumn. The autumn festival marked the close of the year and of
the festal cycle (Exodus xxiii. 16, xxxiv. 22; 1Samuel i. 21, 21;
Isaiah xxix. 1, xxxii. 10). Deuteronomy was discovered in
the eighteenth year of Josiah, and in the very same year Easter
was observed in accordance with the prescriptions of that
law--which could not have been unless the year had begun in autumn.
Now the ECCLESIASTICAL festival of new year in the Priestly Code
is also autumnal. /1/ The _yom teruah_ (Leviticus xxiii 24, 2;;
********************************************
1. In this way Tabernacles comes not before but after new year;
this probably is connected with the more definite dating (on the
fifteenth day of the month), but is quite contrary to the old
custom and the meaning of the feast.
*******************************************
Numbers xxix. 1 seq.) falls on the first new moon of autumn,
and it follows from a tradition confirmed by Leviticus xxv. 9, 10,
that this day was celebrated as new year [R)# H#NH). But it is
always spoken of as the first of the seventh month. That is to
say, the civil new year has been separated from the ecclesiastical
and been transferred to spring; the ecclesiastical can only be
regarded as a relic surviving from an earlier period, and betrays
strikingly the priority of the division of the year that
prevailed in the time of the older monarchy. It appears to have
first begun to give way under the influence of the Babylonians,
who observed the spring era. /1/ For the designation of the
***************************************************
1. In Exodus xii. 2 this change of era is formally commanded by
Moses: "This month (the passover month) shall be the beginning of
months unto you, it shall be to you the first of the months of the
year." According to George Smith, the Assyrian year commenced at
the vernal equinox; the Assyrian use depends on the Babylonian
(Assyrian Eponym Canon, p. 19).
***************************************************
months by numbers instead of by the old Hebrew names, Abib, Zif,
Bul, Ethanim and the like,--a style which arises together with the
use of the spring era,--does not yet occur in Deuteronomy (xvi.1),
but apart from the Priestly Code, and the last redactor of
the Pentateuch (Deuteronomy i. 3) is found for the first time in
writers of the period of the exile. It is first found in Jeremiah,
but only in those portions of his book which were not committed
to writing by him, or at least have been edited by a later hand; /2/
****************************************************
2. Kuenen, Hist.-Krit. Onderzoek (1863), ii. pp. 197, 214.
****************************************************
then in Ezekiel and the author of the Book of Kings, who
explains the names he found in his source by giving the numbers
(1Kings vi. 37, 38, viii. 2); next in Haggai and Zechariah;
and lastly in Chronicles, though here already the
Babylonio-Syrian names of the months, which at first were not used
in Hebrew, have begun to find their way in (Nehemiah i. 1, ii. 1;
Zech. i. 7). The Syrian names are always given along with the
numbers in the Book of Esther, and are used to the exclusion of
all others in that of Maccabees. It would be absurd to attempt to
explain this demonstrable change which took place in the calendar
after the exile as a mere incidental effect of the Priestly Code,
hitherto in a state of suspended animation, rather than by
reference to general causes arising from the circumstances of the
time, under whose influence the Priestly Code itself also stood,
and which then had for their result a complete change in the
greater accuracy and more general applicability of the methods
by which time was reckoned. A similar phenomenon presents itself
in connection with the metric system. The "shekel of the
sanctuary," often mentioned in the Priestly Code, and there only,
cannot possibly have borne this name until the most natural objects
of the old Israelite _regime_ had begun to appear surrounded by a
legendary nimbus, because themselves no longer in actual existence.
Over against it we have the "king's weight" mentioned in a gloss
in 2Samuel xiv. 26, the king being none other than the great king
of Babylon. It is an interesting circumstance that the "shekel
of the sanctuary "spoken of in the Priestly Code is still the ordinary
shekel in Ezekiel; compare Exodus xxx. 13 with Ezekiel xliv. 12.
During the exile the observance of the ecclesiastical new year
seems to have taken place not on the first but on the tenth of the
seventh month (Leviticus xxv. 9; Ezekiel xl. 1), and there is
nothing to be wondered at in this, after once it had come to be
separated from the actual beginning of the year. /1/ This fact alone
***********************************************
1. The tenth of the month is to be taken in Ezekiel as strictly new
year's day; for the designation R)# H#NH occurs in no other
meaning than this, and moreover it is by no mere accident that the
prophet has his vision of the new Jerusalem precisely at the new year.
But according to Leviticus xxv. 9 it is the seventh month that is meant,
on the tenth day of which the trumpets are blown at the commencement
of the year of jubilee.
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would suffice to bring into a clear light the late origin of the
great day of atonement in Leviticus xvi., which at a subsequent
period was observed on this date; for although as a ceremonial of
general purification that day occurs appropriately enough at the
change of the year, the joyful sound of the new year trumpets ill
befits its quiet solemnity, the YWM TRW(H in the Priestly Code
being in fact fixed for the first of the seventh month.
Notwithstanding its conspicuous importance, there is nothing known
of the great day of atonement either in the Jehovistic and
Deuteronomic portions of the Pentateuch or in the historical and
prophetical books. It first begins to show itself in embryo
during the exile. Ezekiel (xiv. 18-20) appoints two great
expiations at the beginning of the two halves of the year; for in
xiv. 20 the LXX must be accepted, which reads B#B(Y BXD#, "in
the seventh month at new moon." The second of these, in autumn,
is similar to that of the Priestly Code, only that it falls on
the first and new year on the tenth, while in the latter, on the
contrary, new year is observed on the first and the atonement on
the tenth; the ritual is also much simpler. Zechariah towards
the end of the sixth century looks back upon two regular fast
days, in the fifth and the seventh month, as having been in
observance for seventy years, that is, from the beginning of the
exile (vii. 5), and to these he adds (viii. 19) two others in the
fourth and in the tenth. They refer, according to the very probable
explanation of C. B. Michaelis, to the historical days of calamity
which preceded the exile. On the ninth day of the fourth month
Jerusalem was taken (Jeremiah xxxix. 2); on the seventh of the fifth
the city and the temple were burnt (2Kings xxv. 8); in the seventh
month Gedaliah was murdered, and all that remained of the Jewish state
annihilated (Jeremiah xli.); in the tenth the siege of the city by
Nebuchadnezzar was begun (2Kings xxv. 1). Zechariah also still
knows nothing of the great day of atonement in Leviticus xvi., but
only mentions among others the fast of the seventh month as
having subsisted for seventy years. Even in 444 B.C., the year
of the publication of the Pentateuch by Ezra, the great day of
atonement has not yet come into force. Ezra begins the reading of
the law in the beginning of the seventh month, and afterwards the
feast of tabernacles is observed on the fifteenth; of an atoning
solemnity on the tenth of the month not a word is said in the
circumstantial narrative, which, moreover, is one specially
interested in the liturgical element, but it is made up for on the
twenty-fourth (Nehemiah viii., ix.). This _testimonium e silentio_
is enough; down to that date the great day of the Priestly Code
(now introduced for the first time) had not existed. /1/ The term is
************************************************
1. "If Leviticus xvi. belongs to the original of the Priestly Code,
and the entire Pentateuch was published by Ezra in the year 444,
and yet the day was not then celebrated, then it has _ipso facto_
been conceded that it is possible that there can be laws which
yet are not carried into effect." So writes Dillmann in his
introduction to Leviticus xvi. (1880, p. 525); every one will grant
him that the law, before it could attain public currency, must
have been previously written and promulgated.
***********************************************
partly fixed, following Ezekiel, by reference to the old new
year's day (Leviticus xxv. 9); partly, following Zechariah, by
reference to the fast of Gedaliah, which indeed was still observed
later as a separate solemnity.
Even before the exile general fast days doubtless occurred, but
they were specially appointed, and always arose out of
extraordinary occasions, when some sin was brought home to the
public conscience, or when the divine anger threatened, especially
in connection with calamities affecting the produce of the soil
(1Kings xxi. 9, 12; Jeremiah xiv. 12, xxxvi. 6, 9; Joel i. 14,
ii. 12, 15). In the exile they began to be a regular custom (Isaiah
lviii.), doubtless in the first instance in remembrance of the
_dies atri_ that had been experienced, but also in a certain measure
as a surrogate, suited to the circumstances, for the joyous popular
gatherings of Easter, Pentecost, and Tabernacles which were
possible only in the Holy Land. /l/
**************************************
1. After the second destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, the system
of fasts received such an impulse that it was necessary to draw up
a list of the days on which fasting was forbidden.
*************************************
At last they came into a position of co-ordination with the feasts,
and became a stated and very important element of the ordinary worship.
In the Priestly Code, the great fast in the tenth of the seventh
month is the holiest day of all the year. Nothing could illustrate
more clearly the contrast between the new cultus and the old; fixing
its regard at all points on sin and its atonement, it reaches its
culmination in a great atoning solemnity. It is as if the temper
of the exile had carried itself into the time of liberation also,
at least during the opening centuries; as if men had felt
themselves not as in an earlier age only momentarily and in
special circumstances, but unceasingly, under the leaden pressure
of sin and wrath. It is hardly necessary to add here expressly
that also in regard to the day of atonement as a day sacred
above all others the Priestly Code became authoritative for the
post-exilian period. "Ritual and sacrifice have through the
misfortunes of the times disappeared, but this has retained all its
old sacredness; unless a man has wholly cut himself adrift from
Judaism he keeps this day, however indifferent he may be to all
its other usages and feasts."
III.IV. [.1?]
A word, lastly, on the lunar feasts, that is, new moon and Sabbath.
That the two are connected cannot be gathered from the Pentateuch,
but something of the sort is implied in Amos viii. 5, and 2Kings
iv. 22, 23. In Amos the corn-dealers, impatient of every
interruption of their trade, exclaim, "When will the new moon be
gone, that we may sell corn; and the Sabbath, that we may set
forth wheat?" In the other passage the husband of the woman of
Shunem, when she begs him for an ass and a servant that she may go
to the prophet Elisha, asks why it is that she proposes such a
journey now, for "it is neither new moon nor Sabbath;" it is
not Sunday, as we might say. Probably the Sabbath was originally
regulated by the phases of the moon, and thus occurred on the
seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first (and twenty-eighth) day of the
month, the new moon being reckoned as the first; at least no other
explanation can be discovered. /2/ For that the week should
************************************
2 George Smith, Assyrian Eponymn Canon, pp. 19, 20. "Among
the Assyrians the first twenty-eight days of every month were
divided into four weeks of seven days each, the seventh, fourteenth,
twenty-first, and twenty-eight days respectively being Sabbaths;
and there was a general prohibition of work on these days."
See further Hyde, Hist. Rel. Vet. Pers., p. 239. Among the Syrians
$bbh means the week, just as among the Arabs _sanba_
and _sanbata_ (Pl. _sanabit_), dim. _suneibita_) mean a period of
time (Lagarde, Ps. Hieronymi; p. 158), and in fact, according
to the lexicographers, a comparatively long one. But in the sole
case cited by the _Tag al 'Arus_, it means rather a short interval.
"What is youth? It is the beginning of a _sanbata_," meaning
something like the Sunday of a week. According to this it would
appear as if the sabbath had been originally the week itself,
and only afterwards became the weekly festival day. The identity
of the Syriac word (ta sabbata) in the New Testament) with the
Hebrew is guaranteed by the twofold Arabic form.
***************************************
be conditioned by the seven planets seems very barely credible.
It was not until after people had got their seven days that they
began to call them after the seven planets; /1/
**********************************************
1. The peculiar order in which the names of the planets are used
to designate the days of the week makes this very clear; see Ideler,
Handb. d. Chron. i. 178 seq., ii 77 seq.
******************************************
the number seven is the only bond of connection between them.
Doubtless the week is older than the names of its days.
Lunar feasts, we may safely say, are in every case older than
annual or harvest feasts; and certainly they are so in the case
of the Hebrews. In the pre-historic period the new moon must have
been observed with such preference that an ancient name for it,
which is no longer found in Biblical Hebrew, even furnished the
root of the general word for a festive occasion, which is used for
the vintage feast in a passage so early as Judges ix. 27. /2/
*****************************************
2. Sprenger (Leben Moh. iii. 527) and Lagarde have rightly
correlated the Hebrew _hallel_ with the Arabic _ahalla_ (to call out,
_labbaika_, see, for example Abulf. i. p. 180). But there is no
uncertainty as to the derivation of _ahalla_ from _hilal_ (new
moon)
*****************************************
But it is established by historical testimonies besides that the
new moon festival anciently stood, at least, on a level with that
of the Sabbath. Compare 1Samuel xx. 5, 6; ~2Kings iv. 23;
Annos viii. 5; Isa i. 13; Hos. ii. 13 (A.V. 11). In the
Jehovistic and Deuteronomic legislation, however, it is completely
ignored, and if it comes into somewhat greater prominence in that
of Ezekiel and the Priestly Code (but without being for a moment
to be compared with the Sabbath), this perhaps has to do with the
circumstance that in the latter the great festivals are regulated
by the new moon, and that therefore it is important that this
should be observed. It may have been with a deliberate intention
that the new moon festival was thrust aside on account of all
sorts of heathenish superstition which readily associated
themselves with it; but, on the other hand, it is possible that
the undersigned preponderance gained by the Sabbath may have ultimately
given it independence, and led to the reckoning of time by
regular intervals of seven days without regard to new moon, with
which now it came into collision, instead of, as formerly, being
supported by it.
As a lunar festival doubtless the Sabbath also went back to a very
remote antiquity. But with the Israelites the day acquired an
altogether peculiar significance whereby it was distinguished
from all other feast days; it became the day of rest _par
excellence_. Originally the rest is only a consequence of the
feast, e.g. that of the harvest festival after the period of
severe labour; the new moons also were marked in this way (Amos
viii. 5; 2Kings iv. 23). In the case of the Sabbath also, rest is,
properly speaking, only the consequence of the fact that the day
is the festal and sacrificial day of the week (Isaiah i. 13;
Ezekiel xlvi. 1 seq.), on which the shewbread was laid out;
but here, doubtless on account of the regularity with which it
every eighth day interrupted the round of everyday work, this
gradually became the essential attribute. In the end even its name
came to be interpreted as if derived from the verb "to rest."
But as a day of rest it cannot be so very primitive in its origin;
in this attribute it presupposes agriculture and a tolerably
hard-pressed working-day life. With this it agrees that an
intensification of the rest of the Sabbath among the Israelites
admits of being traced in the course of the history. The highest
development, amounting even to a change of quality, is seen
in the Priestly Code.
According to 2Kings iv. 22, 23, one has on Sabbath time for
occupations that are not of an everyday kind; servant and ass
can be taken on a journey which is longer than that "of a
Sabbath day." In Hos. ii. 13 (11) we read, "I make an end of all
your joy, your feasts, your new moons and your Sabbaths," that is
to say, the last-named share with the first the happy joyousness
which is impossible in the exile which Jehovah threatens. With
the Jehovist and the Deuteronomist the Sabbath, which, it is true,
is already extended in Amos viii. 5 to commerce, is an
institution specially for agriculture; it is the day of
refreshment for the people and the cattle, and is accordingly
employed for social ends in the same way as the sacrificial meal
is (Exodus xx. 10, xxiii. 12, xxxiv. 21; Deuteronomy v. 13, 14).
Although the moral turn given to the observance is genuinely
Israelitic and not original, yet the rest even here still
continues to be a feast, a satisfaction for the labouring classes;
for what is enjoined as a duty--upon the Israelite rulers, that
is, to whom the legislation is directed--is less that they should
rest than that they should give rest. In the Priestly Code, on
the contrary, the rest of the Sabbath has nothing at all of the
nature of the joyous breathing-time from the load of life which a
festival affords, but is a thing for itself, which separates the
Sabbath not only from the week days, but also from the festival
days, and approaches an ascetic exercise much more nearly than a
restful refreshment. It is taken in a perfectly abstract manner,
not as rest from ordinary work, but as rest absolutely. On the
holy day it is not lawful to leave the camp to gather sticks or
manna (Exod. xvi.; Numbers xv.), not even to kindle a fire or cook
a meal (Exodus xxxv. 3); this rest is in fact a sacrifice of
abstinence from all occupation, for which preparation must already
begin on the preceding day (Exodus xvi.). Of the Sabbath of the
Priestly Code in fact it could not be said that it was made for
man (Mark ii. 27); rather is it a statute that presents itself
with all the rigour of a law of nature, having its reason with
itself, and being observed even by the Creator. The original
narrative of the Creation, according to which God finished His
work on the seventh day, and therefore sanctified it, is amended so
as to be made to say that He finished in six days and rested on
the seventh. /1/
**************************************
1 The contradiction is indubitable when in Genesis ii. 2 it
is said in the first place that on the seventh day God ended
the work which He had made; and then that He rested on the
seventh day from His work. Obviously the second clause is
an authentic interpretation added from very intelligible motives.
***************************************
Tendencies to such an exaggeration of the Sabbath rest as would
make it absolute are found from the Chaldaean period. While
Isaiah, regarding the Sabbath purely as a sacrificial day, says,
"Bring no more vain oblations; it is an abominable incense unto
me; new moon and Sabbath, the temple assembly---I cannot endure
iniquity and solemn meeting," Jeremiah, on the other hand, is the
first of the prophets who stands up for a stricter sanctification
of the seventh day, treating it, however, merely as a day of
rest: "Bear no burden on the Sabbath day, neither bring in by
the gates of Jerusalem nor carry forth a burden out of your
houses, neither do ye any work" (xvii. 21, 22). He adds that this
precept had indeed been given to the fathers, but hitherto has not
been kept; thus, what was traditional appears to have been only
the abstinence from field work and perhaps also from professional
pursuits. In this respect the attitude of Jeremiah is that which
is taken also by his exilian followers, not merely by Ezekiel
(xx. 16, xxii. 263 but also by the Great Unknown (Isaiah lvi. 2,
lviii. 13), who does not otherwise manifest any express partiality
for cultus. While according to Hos. ii. 13, and even Lam. ii. 6,
the Sabbath, as well as the rest of the acts of divine worship,
must cease outside of the Holy Land, it in fact gained in
importance to an extraordinary degree during the exile, having
severed itself completely, not merely from agriculture, but in
particular also from the sacrificial system, and gained entire
independence as a holy solemnity of rest. Accordingly, it became
along with circumcision the symbol that bound together the Jewish
diaspora; thus already in the Priestly Code the two institutions
are the general distinguishing marks of religion [)WT Genesis xvii.
10, 11; Exodus xxxi. 13] which also continue to subsist under
circumstances where as in the exile the conditions of the Mosaic
worship are not present (Genesis ii. 3, xvii. 12, 13). The trouble
which in the meantime the organisers of the church of the second
temple had in forcing into effect the new and strict regulations
is clear from Nehemiah xiii. 15 seq. But they were ultimately
successful. The solemnisation of the Sabbath in Judaism continued
to develop logically on the basis of the priestly legislation, but
always approximating with increasing nearness to the idea; of
absolute rest, so that for the straitest sect of the Pharisees the
business of preparing for the sacred day absorbed the whole week,
and half man's life, so to speak, existed for it alone. "From
Sunday onwards think of the Sabbath," says Shammai. Two details
are worthy of special prominence; the distinction between _yom tob_
and _shabbath_, comparable to that drawn by the Puritans between
Sundays and feast days, and the discussion as to whether the
Sabbath was broken by divine worship; both bring into
recognition that tendency of the Priestly Code in which the later
custom separates itself from its original roots.
III.IV.2. Connected with the Sabbath is the sabbatical year.
In the Book of the Covenant it is commanded that a Hebrew who has
been bought as a slave must after six years of service be liberated
on the seventh unless he himself wishes to remain (Exodus xxi. 2-6).
By the same authority it is ordained in another passage that the
land and fruit-gardens are to be wrought and their produce gathered
for six years, but on the seventh the produce is to be surrendered
(#M+), that the poor of the people may eat, and what they leave
the beasts of the field may at (xxiii. 10, 11). Here there is
no word of a sabbatical year. The liberation of the Hebrew slave
takes place six years after his purchase, that is, the term is a
relative one. In like manner, in the other ordinance there is
nothing to indicate an absolute seventh year; and besides, it is
not a Sabbath or fallow time for the _land_ that is contemplated,
but a surrender of the _harvest_.
The first of these commands is repeated in Deuteronomy without
material alteration, and to a certain extent word for word (xv.
12-18). The other has at least an analogue in Deuteronomy xv. 1-6:
"At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release
(surrender, s*m+h), and this is the manner of it; no creditor
that lendeth aught shall exact it of his neighbour or of his
brother, because Jehovah's release has been proclaimed; of a
foreigner thou mayst exact it again, but that which is of thine
with thy brother, thy hand shall release."
That this precept is parallel with Exodus xxiii. 10, 11, is shown
by the word #m+h~; but this has a different meaning put upon it
which plainly is introduced as new. Here it is not landed property
that is being dealt with, but money, and what has to be
surrendered is not the interest of the debt merely (comparable to
the fruit of the soil), but the capital itself; the last clause
admits of no other construction, however unsuitable the regulation
may be. A step towards the sabbatical year is discernible in it,
in so far as the seventh year term is not a different one for each
individual debt according to the date when it was incurred (in
which case it might have been simply a period of prescription),
but is a uniform and common term publicly fixed: it is absolute,
not relative. But it does not embrace the whole seventh year,
it does not come in at the end of six years as in Exodus, but at
the end of seven; the surrender of the harvest demands the whole
year, the remission of debts, comparatively speaking, only a moment.
The sabbatical year is peculiar to the Priestly Code, or, to speak
more correctly, to that collection of laws incorporated and edited
by it, which lies at the basis of Leviticus xvii.-xxvi. In Leviticus
xxv. 1-7 we read:
"When ye come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep
a Sabbath to Jehovah. Six years shalt thou sow thy field and prune
thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; but in the seventh
year shall the land keep a Sabbath of rest unto Jehovah: thy field
shalt thou not sow, thy vineyard shalt thou not prune; that which
groweth of its own accord of thy harvest shalt thou not reap, neither
shalt thou gather the grapes of thy vine undressed; the land shall
have a year of rest, and the Sabbath of the land shall be food for
you; for thee, and for thy servant, and for thy maid, and for thy
hired servant, and for thy cattle, and for all the beasts that are
in thy land, shall all the increase thereof be food."
The expressions make it impossible to doubt that Exodus xxiii. 10, 11
lies at the foundation of this law; but out of this as a basis it
is something different that has been framed. The seventh year,
which is there a relative one, has here become fixed,--not varying
for the various properties, but common for the whole land, a
sabbatical year after the manner of the Sabbath day. This amounts
to a serious increase in the difficulty of the matter, for it is
not one and the same thing to have the abstinence from harvest
spread over seven years and to have it concentrated into one out of
every seven. In like manner a heightening of the demand is also seen
in the circumstance that not merely harvesting but also sowing
and dressing are forbidden. In the original commandment this was
not the case; all that was provided for was that in the seventh
year the harvest should not fall to the lot of the proprietor of the
soil, but should be _publici juris_,--a relic perhaps of communistic
agriculture. Through a mere misunderstanding of the verbal suffix
in Exodus xxiii. 11, as has been conjectured by Hupfeld, a surrender
of the _fruit_ of the land has been construed into a surrender of the
land itself--a general fallow year (Leviticus xxv. 4). The
misunderstanding, however, is not accidental, but highly characteristic.
In Exodus xxiii. the arrangement is made for man; it is a limitation,
for the common good, of private rights of property in land,--in fact,
for the benefit of the landless, who in the seventh year are to have
the usufruct of the soil; in Leviticus xxv. the arrangement is for
the sake of the land,--that it may rest, if not on the seventh day,
at least on the seventh year, and for the sake of the Sabbath--
that it may extend its supremacy over nature also. Of course this
presupposes the extreme degree of Sabbath observance by absolute
rest, and becomes comprehensible only when viewed as an outgrowth
from that. For the rest, a universal fallow season is possible
only under circumstances in which a people are to a considerable
extent independent of the products of their own agriculture; prior
to the exile even the idea of such a thing could hardly have
occurred.
In the Priestly Code the year of jubilee is further added to
supplement in turn the sabbatical year (Leviticus xxv. 8 seq.).
As the latter is framed to correspond with the seventh day,
so the former corresponds with the fiftieth, i.e., with Pentecost,
as is easily perceived from the parallelism of Leviticus xxv. 8
with Leviticus xxiii. 15. Asthe fiftieth day after the seven
Sabbath days is celebrated as a closing festival of the forty-nine
days' period, so is the fiftieth year after the seven sabbatic years
as rounding off the larger interval; the seven Sabbaths falling on
harvest time, which are usually reckoned specially (Luke vi. 1 ),
have, in the circumstance of their interrupting harvest work, a
particular resemblance to the sabbatic years which interrupt agriculture
altogether. Jubilee is thus an artificial institution superimposed
upon the years of fallow regarded as harvest Sabbaths after the
analogy of Pentecost. Both its functions appear originally to
have belonged also to the Sabbath year and to be deduced from the
two corresponding regulations in Deuteronomy relating to the
seventh year, so that thus Exod xxiii. would be the basis of Leviticus
xxv. 1-7 and Deuteronomy xv. that of xxv. 8 seq. The emancipation
of the Hebrew slave originally had to take place on the seventh
year after the purchase, afterwards (it would seem) on the seventh
vear absolutely; for practical reasons it was transferred from
that to the fiftieth. Analogous also, doubtless, is the growth of
the other element in the jubilee--the return of mortgaged property
to its hereditary owner--out of the remission of debts enjoined in
Deuteronomy xv. for the end of the seventh year; for the two hang
very closely together, as Leviticus xxv. 23 seq. shows.
As for the evidence for these various arrangements, those of the
Book of the Covenant are presupposed alike by Deuteronomy and by
the Priestly Code. It seems to have been due to the prompting of
Deuteronomy that towards the end of the reign of Zedekiah the
emancipation of the Hebrew slaves was seriously gone about; the
expressions in Jeremiah xxxiv. 14 point to Deuteronomy xv. 12,
and not to Exodus xxi. 2. The injunction not having had practical
effect previously, it was in this instance carried through by
all parties at the same date: this was of course inevitable when
it was introduced as an extraordinary innovation; perhaps it is
in connexion with this that a fixed seventh year grew out of a
relative one. The sabbatical year, according to the legislator's
own declaration, was never observed throughout the whole
pre-exilic period; for, according to Leviticus xxvi. 34, 35, the
desolation of the land during the exile is to be a compensation
made for the previously neglected fallow years:
"Then shall the land pay its Sabbaths as long as it lieth desolate;
when ye are in your enemies' land then shall the land rest
and pay its Sabbaths; all the days that it lieth desolate shall
it rest, which it rested not in your Sabbaths when ye dwelt upon
it."
The verse is quoted in 2Chronicles xxxvi. 21 as the language
of Jeremiah,-- a correct and unprejudiced indication of its exilic
origin. But as the author of Leviticus xxvi. was also the writer of
Leviticus xxv. 1-7, that is to say, the framer of the law of the
sabbatic year, the recent date of the latter regulation also
follows at once. The year of jubilee, certainly derived from the
Sabbath year, is of still later origin. Jeremiah (xxxiv. 14) has
not the faintest idea that the emancipation of the slaves must
according to "law" take place in the fiftieth year. The name
drwr, borne by the jubilee in Leviticus xxv. 10, is applied by him
to the seventh year; and this is decisive also for Ezekiel xlvi. 17:
the gift of land bestowed by the prince on one of his servants
remains in his possession only until the seventh year.
CHAPTER IV. THE PRIESTS AND THE LEVITES.
IV.I.
IV.I.1 The problem now to be dealt with is exhibited with peculiar
distinctness in one pregnant case with which it will be well to set
out. The Mosaic law, that is to say, the Priestly Code,
distinguishes, as is well known, between the twelve secular tribes
and Levi, and further within the spiritual tribe itself, between
the sons of Aaron and the Levites, simply so called. The one
distinction is made visible in the ordering of the camp in Numbers
ii., where Levi forms around the sanctuary a cordon of protection
against the immediate contact of the remaining tribes; on the
whole, however, it is rather treated as a matter of course, and
not brought into special prominence (Numbers xviii. 22). The other
is accentuated with incomparably greater emphasis. Aaron and his
sons alone are priests, qualified for sacrificing and burning
incense; the Levites are hieroduli (3 Esdras i. 3), bestowed
upon the Aaronidae for the discharge of the inferior services
(Numbers iii. 9). They are indeed their tribe fellows, but it is
not because he belongs to Levi that Aaron is chosen, and his
priesthood cannot be said to be the acme and flower of the general
vocation of his tribe. On the contrary, rather was he a priest
long before the Levites were set apart; for a considerable time
after the cultus has been established and set on foot these do not
make any appearance,--not at all in the whole of the third book,
which thus far does little honour to its name _Leviticus_. Strictly
speaking, the Levites do not even belong to the clergy: they are
not called by Jehovah, but consecrated by the children of Israel
to the sanctuary,--consecrated in the place of the first-born, not
however as priests (neither in Numbers iii., iv., viii., nor
anywhere else in the Old Testament, is there a single trace of the
priesthood of the first-born), but as a gift due to the priests, as
such being even required to undergo the usual "waving" before the altar,
to symbolise their being cast into the altar flame (Numbers viii.).
The relationship between Aaron and Levi, and the circumstance that
precisely this tribe is set apart for the sanctuary in compensation
for the first-born, appears almost accidental, but at all events
cannot be explained by the theory that Aaron rose on the shoulders
of Levi; on the contrary, it rather means that Levi has mounted up
by means of Aaron, whose priesthood everywhere is treated as having
the priority. Equality between the two is not to be spoken of;
their office and their blood relationship separates them more than
it binds them together.
Now, the prophet Ezekiel, in the plan of the new Jerusalem which he
sketched in the year 573, takes up among other things the reform of
the relations of the _personnel_ of the temple, and in this
connection expresses himself as follows (xliv. 6-16):--
"Thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Let it suffice you of all your
abominations, O house of Israel! in that ye have brought in strangers,
uncircumcised in heart and uncircumcised in flesh, to be in my
sanctuary, to pollute it, even my house, when ye offer my bread,
the fat and the blood, and have broken my covenant by all your
abominations. And ye have not kept the charge of my holy
things, inasmuch as ye have set these /1/ to be keepers of my
*******************************************
In ver. 7 for WYPRW read WTPRW, in ver. 8 for WT#YMWN read
WT#YMWM, and for LKM read LKN, in each case following the LXX.
******************************************
charge in my sanctuary. Therefore, thus saith the Lord Jehovah,
No stranger uncircumcised in heart and uncircumcised in flesh
shall enter into my sanctuary; none, of all that are among the
children of Israel. But the Levites who went away far from me
when Israel went astray from me after their idols, they shall
even bear their iniquity, and they shall be ministers in my
sanctuary, officers at the gates of the house and ministers of the
house; they shall slay for the people the burnt-offering and
the thank-offering, and they shall stand before them to minister
unto them. Because they ministered unto them before their idols,
and caused the house of Israel to fall into iniquity, therefore
have I lifted up my hand against them, saith the Lord Jehovah,
and they shall bear their iniquity. They shall not come near
unto me to do the office of a priest unto me, nor to come near to
any of my holy things, but they shall bear their shame and
their abominations which they have committed. And I will make
them keepers of the charge of the house, for all its service, and
for all that shall be done therein. But the priests, the Levites,
sons of Zadok, that kept the charge of my sanctuary when
the children of Israel went astray from me, they shall come near
to me to minister unto me, and they shall stand before me to
offer unto me the fat and the blood, saith the Lord Jehovah;
they shall enter into my sanctuary, and come near to my table
to minister unto me, and they shall keep my charge."
From this passage two things are to be learned. First, that the
systematic separation of that which was holy from profane contact
did not exist from the very beginning; that in the temple of
Solomon even heathen (Zech. xiv. 21), probably captives, were
employed to do hierodulic services which, according to the law,
ought to have been rendered by Levites, and which afterwards
actually were so rendered. Ezekiel, it is indeed true, holds
this custom to be a frightful abuse, and one might therefore
maintain it to have been a breach of the temple ordinances
suffered by the Jerusalem priests against their better knowledge,
and in this way escape accusing them of ignorance of their own
law. But the second fact, made manifest by the above-quoted
passage, quite excludes the existence of the Priestly Code so far
as Ezekiel and his time are concerned. The place of the heathen
temple-slaves is in future to be taken by the Levites. Hitherto
the latter had held the priesthood, and that too not by arbitrary
usurpation, but in virtue of their oun good right. For it is no
mere relegation back to within the limits of their lawful position
when they are made to be no longer priests but temple
ministrants, it is no restoration of the _status quo ante_, the
conditions of which they had illegally broken; it is expressly
a degradation, a withdrawal of their right, which appears as a
punishment and which must be justified as being deserved; "they
shall bear their iniquity." They have forfeited their priesthood,
by abusing it to preside over the cultus of the high places, which
the prophet regards as idolatry and hates in his inmost soul.
Naturally those Levites are exempted from the penalty who have
discharged their functions at the legal place,--the Levites the
sons of Zadok,--namely, at Jerusalem, who now remain sole priests
and receive a position of pre-eminence above those who hitherto
have been their equals in office, and who are still associated with
them by Ezekiel, under the same common name, but now are reduced
to being their assistants and hieroduli.
It is an extraordinary sort of justice when the priests of the
abolished Bamoth are punished simply for having been so, and
conversely the priests of the temple at Jerusalem rewarded for this;
the fault of the former and the merit of the latter consist simply
in their existence. In other words, Ezekiel merely drapes the logic
of facts with a mantle of morality. From the abolition of the
popular sanctuaries in the provinces in favour of the royal one at
Jerusalem, there necessarily followed the setting aside of the
provincial priesthoods in favour of the sons of Zadok at the
temple of Solomon. The original author of the centralisation, the
Deuteronomic lawgiver, seeks indeed to prevent this consequence by
giving to the extraneous Levites an equal right of sacrificing in
Jerusalem with their brethren hereditarily settled there, but it
was not possible to separate the fate of the priests from that of
their altars in this manner. The sons of Zadok were well enough
pleased that all sacrifices should be concentrated within their
temple, but they did not see their way to sharing their
inheritance with the priesthood of the high places, and the idea
was not carried out (2Kings xxiii. 9). Ezekiel, a thorough
Jerusalemite, finds a moral way of putting this departure from
the law, a way of putting it which does not explain the fact, but
is merely a periphrastic statement of it. With Deuteronomy as a
basis it is quite easy to understand Ezekiel's ordinance, but it
is absolutely impossible if one starts from the Priestly Code.
What he regards as the original right of the Levites, the
performance of priestly services, is treated in the latter
document as an unfounded and highly wicked pretension which once
in the olden times brought destruction upon Korah and his company;
what he considers to be a subsequent withdrawal of their right, as
a degradation in consequence of a fault, the other holds to have
been their hereditary and natural destination. The distinction
between priest and Levite which Ezekiel introduces and justifies
as an innovation, according to the Priestly Code has always
existed; what in the former appears as a beginning, in the latter
has been in force ever since Moses,--an original datum, not a thing
that has become or been made./1/ That the prophet should know
**********************************************
1. "If by reason of their birth it was impossible for the Levites
to become priests, then it would be more than strange to deprive
them of the priesthood on account of their faults,--much as if one
were to threaten the commons with the punishment of disqualification
to sit or vote in a house of lords" (Kuenen, Theol. Tijdschr., iii. 465).
*********************************************
nothing about a priestly law with whose tendencies he is in
thorough sympathy admits of only one explanation,--that it did
not then exist. His own ordinances are only to be understood as
preparatory steps towards its own exactment.
IV.I.2. Noldeke, however, interprets the parallelism between the
sons of Aaron and the sons of Zadok in favour of the priority of
the Priestly Code, which, after all, he points out, is not quite
so exclusive as Ezekiel. /1/ But, in the first place, this is a
*******************************************
1 Jahrb. f. prot. Theol., 1875, p. 351: "Its doctrine that
the Aaronidae alone are true priests has its parallel in
Ezekiel, who _still more exclusively_ recognises only
the sons of Zadok as priests."
******************************************
point of subordinate importance, the main thing being that Ezekiel
has to make the distinction between priests and Levites, which is
regarded in the Priestly Code as very ancient. In presence of
the fact that the former introduces as a new thing the separation
which the latter presupposes, the precise degree of the
distinction drawn by the two is of no consequence whatever. In
the next place, to bring the sons of Aaron into comparison with the
sons of Zadok, as a proof of their higher antiquity, is just as
reasonable as to bring the tabernacle into comparison with the
temple of Jerusalem for a similar purpose. The former are priests
of the tabernacle, the latter of the temple; but as in point of
fact the only distinction to be drawn between the Mosaic and the
actual central sanctuary is that between shadow and substance, so
neither can any other be made between the Mosaic and the actual
central priesthood. In the Priestly Code the ancient name is
introduced instead of the historical one, simply in order to
maintain the semblance of the Mosaic time; if the circumstance
is to be taken as betokening the earlier origin of the work, then
a similar inference must be drawn also from the fact that in it
the origin and character of the Levites is quite obscure, while
in Ezekiel it is palpably evident that they are the priests thrown
out of employment by the abolition of the Bamoth, whom necessity
has compelled to take a position of subordination under their
haughty fellow-priests at Jerusalem. In truth it is, quite on the
contrary, a proof of the post-exilian date of the Priestly Code
that it makes sons of Aaron of the priests of the central
sanctuary, who, even in the traditional understanding (2Chronicles
xiii. 10), are in one way or other simply the priests of
Jerusalem. By this means it carries their origin back to the
foundation of the theocracy, and gives them out as from the first
having been alone legitimate. But such an idea no one could have
ventured to broach before the exile. At that time it was too well
known that the priesthood of the Jerusalem sept could not be
traced further back than David's time, but dated from Zadok, who in
Solomon's reign ousted the hereditary house of Eli from the position
it had long previously held, first at Shiloh and Nob, and
afterwards at Jerusalem, at what had become the most prominent
sanctuary of Israel.
In a passage of Deuteronomic complexion, which cannot have been
written long before the exile, we read in a prediction made to Eli
regarding the overthrow of his house by Zadok:
"I said indeed, saith Jehovah the God of Israel, that thy house
and the house of thy father shall walk before me for ever; but now
I say, Be it far from me, for them that honour me I will honour,
but they that despise me shall be lightly esteemed. Behold, the days
come that I will cut off thine arm and the arm of thy father's house,
...and I will raise up for myself a faithful priest who shall do
according to what is in my heart and in my mind; and I will build
him a sure house, and he shall walk before mine anointed for ever"
(1Samuel ii. 27-36).
Here it is the house of Eli, and of Eli's father, that is the priestly
family duly chosen in Egypt; _contrary_ to hereditary title, and
contrary to a promise of perpetual continuance, is it deposed at
the higher claims of justice. The faithful priest who is to fill
the vacant place is Zadok. This is expressly said in 1Kings 2:27;
and no other than he ever had a "sure house" and walked uninterruptedly
as its head and ruler before the kings of Judah. This Zadok,
accordingly, belongs neither to Eli's house nor to that of Eli's father;
his priesthood does not go back as far as the time of the founding
of the theocracy, and is not in any proper sense "legitimate;"
rather has he obtained it by the infringement of what might be called
a constitutional privilege, to which there were no other heirs
besides Eli and his family. Obviously he does not figure as an
intermediate link in the line of Aaron, but as the beginner of an
entirely new genealogy; the Jerusalem priests, whose ancestor he is,
are interlopers dating from the beginning of the monarchical period,
in whom the old Mosaic _sacerdotium_ is not continued, but is broken
off. If then they are called in the Priestly Code "sons of Aaron,"
or at least figure there among the sons of Aaron, with whom they can
only in point of fact be contrasted, the circumstance is an unmistakable
indication that at this point the threads of tradition from the
pre-exilic period have been snapped completely, which was not yet
the case in Ezekiel's time. /1/
********************************************
1. To satisfy the Pentateuch it is shown in the Book of Chronicles,
by means of artificial genalogies, how the sons of Zadok derived
their origin in an unbroken line from Aaron and Eleazar.
Compare my Pharisaer u. Sadducaer, p. 48 seq. This point was
first observed by Vatke (p. 344 seq.), then by Kuenen (Theol.
Tijdschr., iii. p. 463-509) and lastly by me (Text der BB. Sam.,
p. 48-51).
********************************************
The relation between the priestly legislation and the Book of
Ezekiel, which has now been shown, gives direction and aim
to the following sketch, in which it is sought to exhibit the
individual phenomenon in its general connection.
IV.II.
IV.II.1. The setting apart from the rest of the people of an
entire tribe as holy, and the strongly accentuated distinction of
ranks within that tribe, presuppose a highly systematised separation
between sacred and profane, and an elaborate machinery connected
with cultus. In fact, according to the representation given in
the Priestly Code, the Israelites from the beginning were organised
as a hierocracy, the clergy being the skeleton, the high priest the
head, and the tabernacle the heart. But the suddenness with which
this full-grown hierocracy descended on the wilderness from the skies
is only matched by the suddenness with which it afterwards disappeared
in Canaan, leaving no trace behind it. In the time of the Judges,
priests and Levites, and the congregation of the children of Israel
assembled around them, have utterly vanished; there is hardly a
_people_ Israel,--only individual tribes which do not combine even
under the most pressing necessities, far less support at a common
expense a clerical _personnel_ numbering thousands of men, besides
their wives and families. Instead of the Ecclesiastical History
of the Hexateuch, the Book of Judges forthwith enters upon a secular
history completely devoid of all churchly character. The high priest,
who according to the Priestly Code is the central authority by the
grace of God, is here quite left out in the cold, for the really
acting heads of the people are the Judges, people of an entirely
different stamp, whose authority, resting on no official position,
but on strength of personality and on the force of circumstances,
seldom extends beyond the limits of their tribe. And it is plain
that in this we behold not the sorry remains of an ecclesiastico-political
system once flourishing under Moses and Joshua, now completely
fallen into ruins, but the first natural beginnings of a civil
authority which after a course of further development finally led
to the monarchy.
In the kernel of the Book of Judges (chaps. iii.-xvi.) there
nowhere occurs a single individual whose profession is to take
charge of the cultus. Sacrifice is in two instances offered, by
Gideon and Manoah; but in neither case is a priest held to be
necessary. In a gloss upon 1Samuel vi. 13 seq. the divergence of
later custom reveals itself. When the ark of Jehovah was brought
back from exile in Philistia upon the new cart, it halted in the
field of Bethshemesh beside the great stone, and the inhabitants
of Bethshemesh, who were at the time busy with the wheat harvest,
broke up the cart and made on the stone a burnt-offering of the kine
by which it had been drawn. After they have finished, the Levites
come up (ver. 15) (in the pluperfect tense) and proceed as if nothing
had happened, lift the ark from the now no longer existent cart,
and set it upon the stone on which the sacrifice is already burning;-
of course only in order to fulfil the law, the demands of which
have been completely ignored in the original narrative. Until
the cultus has become in some measure centralised the priests have
no _locus standi_; for when each man sacrifices for himself and his
household, upon an altar which he improvises as best he can for
the passing need, where is the occasion for people whose
professional and essential function is that of sacrificing for
others? The circumstance of their being thus inconspicuous in the
earliest period of the history of Israel is connected with the
fact that as yet there are few great sanctuaries. But as soon as
these begin to occur, the priests immediately appear. Thus we find
Eli and his sons at the old house of God belonging to the tribe of
Ephraim at Shiloh. Eli holds a very exalted position, his sons are
depicted as high and mighty men, who deal with the worshippers not
directly but through a servant, and show arrogant disregard of their
duties to Jehovah. The office is hereditary, and the priesthood
already very numerous. At least in the time of Saul, after they had
migrated from Shiloh to Nob, on account of the destruction by the
Philistines of the temple at the former place, they numbered more
than eighty-five men, who, however, are not necessarily proper
blood-relations of Eli, although reckoning themselves as belonging
to his clan (1Samuel xxii. 11). /1/
***********************************************
1. In 1Samuel i. seq., indeed, we read only of Eli and his two
sons and one servant, and even David and Solomon appear to have
had only a priest or two at the chief temple. Are we to suppose
that Doeg, single-handed, could have made away with eighty-five
men ?
************************************************
One sanctuary more is referred to towards the close of the period
of the Judges,--that at Dan beside the source of the Jordan. A rich
Ephraimite, Micah, had set up to Jehovah a silver-covered image,
and lodged it in an appropriate house. At first he appointed one
of his sons to be its priest, afterwards Jonathan ben Gershom
ben Moses, a homeless Levite of Bethlehem-Judah, whom he counted
himself happy in being able to retain for a yearly salary of ten
pieces of silver, besides clothing and maintenance. When, however,
the Danites, hard pressed by the Philistines, removed from their
ancient settlements in order to establish a new home for themselves
on the slopes of Hermon in the north, they in passing carried off
both Micah's image and his priest; what led them to do so was the
report of their spies who had formerly lodged with Micah and there
obtained an oracle. It was in this way that Jonathan came to Dan
and became the founder of the family which retained the priesthood
at this afterwards so important sanctuary down to the period of the
deportation of the Danites at the Assyrian captivity (Judges xvii.,
xviii.). His position seems very different from that of Eli.
The only point of resemblance is that both are hereditary priests,
Levites so called, and trace their descent from the family of Moses,--
of which more anon. But while Eli is a man of distinction, perhaps
the owner of the sanctuary, at all events in a position of
thorough independence and the head of a great house, Jonathan is a
solitary wandering Levite who enters the service of the proprietor
of a sanctuary for pay and maintenance, and is indeed nourished
as a son by his patron, but by no means treated with special
respect by the Danites.
The latter case, it may well be conjectured, more nearly
represents the normal state of matters than the former. An
independent and influential priesthood could develop itself only
at the larger and more public centres of worship, but that of
Shiloh seems to have been the only one of this class. The
remaining houses of God, of which we hear some word from the
transition period which preceded the monarchy, are not of
importance, and are in private hands, thus corresponding to that
of Micah on Mount Ephraim. That of Ophra belongs to Gideon, and
that of Kirjathjearim to Abinadab. In fact, it appears that
Micah, in appointing one to minister at his sanctuary for hire,
would seem to have followed a more general practice. For the
expression ML( YDW, which still survived as a _terminus technicus_
for the ordination of priests long after they had attained a
perfectly independent position, can originally in this
connection hardly have meant anything else than a filling of the
hand with money or its equivalent; thus the priestly office
would appear in the older time to have been a paid one, perhaps
the only one that was paid. Whom he shall appoint is at the
discretion of the proprietor: if no one else is available, he
gives it to one of his sons (Judges xvii. 5; 1Samuel vii. 1),--
of a "character indelibilis" there is of course in such a case
no idea, as one can learn from the earliest example, in which
Micah's son retires again from the service after a brief interval.
David, when he removed the ark, intrusted it in the first instance
to the house of Obededom, a captain of his, a Philistine of Gath,
whom he made its keeper. A priest of regular calling, a Levite,
is, according to Judges xvii. 13, a very unusual person to find
at an ordinary sanctuary. Even at Shiloh, where, however, the
conditions are extraordinary, the privilege of the sons of Eli is
not an exclusive one; Samuel, who is not a member of the family,
is nevertheless adopted as a priest. The service for which a
stated minister was needed was not that of offering sacrifice;
this was not so regular an occurrence as not to admit of being
attended to by one's self. For a simple altar no priest was
required, but only for a house which contained a sacred image; /1/
********************************************
1. BYT (LHYM, "house of God," is never anything but the house of an
image. Outside of the Priestly Code, _ephod_ is the image, _ephod
bad_ the priestly garment.
********************************************
this demanded watching and attendance (1 Sam. vii. 1)--in fact,
an ephod like that of Gideon or that of Micah (Judges viii. 26,
27, XVii. 4) was an article well worth stealing, and the houses of
God ordinarily lay in an open place (Exodus xxxiii. 7). The
expressions #MR and #RT to denote the sacred service were
retained in use from this period to later times; and, while every
one knows how to sacrifice, the art of dealing with the ephod and
winning its oracle from it continues from time immemorial to be
the exclusive secret of the priest. In exceptional cases, the
attendant is occasionally not the priest himself, but
his disciple. Thus Moses has Joshua with him as his _aedituus_ /2/
*******************************************************
2 M#RT M#H, more precisely m'' (T YY PNY M#H HKHN, 1Samuel. ii. 11.
********************************************************
(Exodus xxxiii. 11), who does not quit the tent of Jehovah; so
also Eli has Samuel, who sleeps at night in the inner portion of
the temple beside the ark of the covenant; even if perhaps the
narrative of Samuel's early years is not quite in accordance with
the actual circumstances as they existed at Shiloh, it is still
in any case a perfectly good witness to a custom of the
existence of which we are apprised from other sources. Compare now
with this simple state of affairs the fact that in the Priestly
Code the sons of Aaron have something like the half of a total of
22,000 Levites to assist them as watchers and ministers of
the sanctuary.
Any one may slaughter and offer sacrifice (1Samuel xiv. 34
seq.); and, even in cases where priests are present, there is not
a single trace of a systematic setting apart of what is holy, or
of shrinking from touching it. When David "entered into the house
of God and did eat the shew-bread, which it is not lawful to eat
save for the priests, and gave also to them that were with him"
(Mark ii. 26), this is not represented in 1Sam. xxi. as
illegitimate when those who eat are sanctified, that is, have
abstained on the previous day from women. Hunted fugitives lay
hold of the horns of the altar without being held guilty of
profanation. A woman, such as Hannah, comes before Jehovah, that
is, before the altar, to pray; the words WTTYCB LPNY YY
(1Samuel i. 9) supplied by the LXX, are necessary for the connection,
and have been omitted from the Massoretic text as offensive. In
doing so she is observed by the priest, who sits quietly, as is
his wont, on his seat at the temple door. The history of the ark
particularly, as Vatke justly remarks (pp. 317, 332), affords more
than one proof of the fact that the notion of the unapproachableness
of the holy was quite unknown; I shall content myself with the most
striking of these. Samuel the Ephraimite sleeps by virtue of his
office every night beside the ark of Jehovah, a place whither,
according
to Leviticus xvi., the high priest may come only once in the year,
and even he only after the strictest preparation and with the
most elaborate atoning rites. The contrast in the TONE OF FEELING
is so great that no one as yet has even ventured to realise it
clearly to himself.
IV.II.2. With the commencement of the monarchical period the priests
forthwith begin to come into greater prominence along with the
kings; the advance in centralisation and in publicity of life
makes itself noticeable also in the department of worship. At the
beginning of Saul's reign we find the distinguished Ephraimitic
priesthood, the house of Eli, no longer at Shiloh, but at Nob, in
the vicinity of the king, and to a certain degree in league with
him; for their head, Ahijah the priest, is in immediate
attendance on him when arms are first raised against the
Phiiistines, shares the danger with him, and consults the ephod on
his behalf. Subsequently the _entente cordiale_ was disturbed,
Ahijah and his brethren fell a sacrifice to the king's jealousy,
and thus the solitary instance of an independent and considerable
priesthood to be met with in the old history of Israel came for
ever to an end. Abiathar, who alone escaped the massacre of Nob
(1Samuel xxii.), fled with the ephod to David, for which he was
rewarded afterwards with high honours, but all that he became he
became as servant of David. Under David the regius priesthood
began to grow towards the importance which it from that time
forward had. This king exercised unfettered control over the
sanctuary of the ark which stood in his citadel, as also over
the appointment of the priests, who were merely his officials.
Alongside of Abiathar he placed Zadok (and subsequently Ira also),
as well as some of his own sons. For when it is stated in
2Sam. viii. 18 that the sons of David were priests, the words
must not out of regard to the Pentateuch be twisted so as to mean
something different from what they say. We also (1Kings iv. 5)
find the son of the prophet Nathan figuring as a priest, and on
the other hand the son of Zadok holding a high secular office
(ver. 2); even at this date the line of demarcation afterwards
drawn between holy and non-holy persons has no existence. What
under David was still wanting to the institution of the royal
worship and the regius priests--a fixed centre--was added by
the erection of the temple under his successor. At the beginning
of Solomon's reign there was still no ISRAELITE place of sacrifice
such as sufficed for the greater contingencies; he was compelled
to celebrate his accession at the great Bamah at Gibeon, a town
in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, which, although it had been
subjugated for a considerable time, was still entirely Canaanite.
He now took care to make it possible that his colossal festivals
should be celebrated at his own sanctuary. And next he made Zadok
its priest after having previously deposed and relegated to his
patrimonial property at Anathoth, a village adjoining Jerusalem,
the aged Abiathar, a man of pure and honourable priestly descent,
on account of the support he had given to the legitimate heir
to the crown, thereby bringing to pass the fate with which the
once so proud and powerful family of Eli had in 1Samuel ii. been
threatened. Doubtless other priests also by degrees attached
themselves to the family of Zadok, and ultimately came even to call
themselves his sons, just as the Rechabites regarded Jonathan
ben Rechab, or the "children of the prophets" one or other of
the great prophets, as their father.
Regarding their sanctuaries as their own private property,
precisely as Micah does in the classical instance recorded in
Judges xvii., xviii., and proceeding quite untrammelled in the
appointment and removal of the officials employed, neither do
these early kings hesitate in the least to exercise personally
the rights which had emanated from themselves, and been delegated
to others. Of Saul, who indeed was in the habit of delegating
but seldom, and of doing with his own hand all that required to
be done, it is several times mentioned that he sacrificed in person;
and it is clear that this is not brought as a charge against him in
1Samuel xiv. and xv. David sacrificed on the occasion of his having
successfully brought the ark to Jerusalem; that it was he himself
who officiated appears from the fact that he wore the priestly
ephod--_the ephod bad_--and at the close of the offering pronounced the
benediction (2Samuel vi. 14, 18). In the same way was the
consecration of the temple conducted by Solomon; it was he who
went before the altar, and after praying there upon his knees with
outstretched arms, rose and blessed the people (1Kings viii.
22, 54, 53),--doubtless also it was he who with his own hands
offered the first sacrifice. The priests' technical skill is
necessary only for inquiring of the oracle before the ephod
(1Samuel xiv. 18).
IV.II.3. These beginnings are continued in the history of the
priesthood after the division of the kingdom. Jeroboam I., the
founder of the kingdom of Israel, is treated by the historian as
the founder also of Israel's worship in so far as the latter
differed from the Judaean ideal: "he made the two calves of gold,
and set them up at Bethel and at Dan; he made the Bamoth-houses
and made priests from the mass of the people, who were not of the
sons of Levi, and ordained a feast in the eighth month and
ascended to the altar to burn incense" (1Kings xii. 28 seq.,
xiii. 33). Here indeed after the well-known manner of pious
pragmatism retrospective validity is given to the Deuteronomic
law which did not come into force until three centuries
afterwards, and judgment is thus passed in accordance with a
historically inadmissable standard; moreover, the facts on which
the judgment is based are on the one hand too much generalised,
and on the other hand laid too exclusively to the charge of
Jeroboam. The first king bears the weight of all the sins in
worship of all his successors and of the whole body of the
people. But the recognition of the sovereign priesthood of the
ruler, of the formative influence which he exercised over the
worship, is just. The most important temples were royal ones,
and the priests who attended at them were the king's priests
(Amos vii. 10 seq.). When therefore Jehu overthrew the house
of Ahab, he did not extirpate all its members merely, and its
officials and courtiers, but also its priests as well; they
too were servants of the crown and in positions of trust
(2Kings x. 11I; comp. 1Kings iv. 5). The statement that they
were chosen at the pleasure of the king is therefore to be taken
as implying that, as in David's and Solomon's time, so also later
they could and might be chosen at pleasure; on the other hand, in
point of fact the sacred office, in Dan at least, continued from
the period of the Judges down to the Assyrian deportation
hereditary in the family of Jonathan. One must, moreover, avoid
imagining that all the "houses of the high places" and all the
priestly posts /1/ belonged to the king; it was impossible that the
********************************************
1. The parallelism between "Bamoth-houses" and a priestly
appointment in 1Kings xii. 31 seems not to be casual merely.
Whilst a Bamah may be a simple altar, a "Bamoth-house"
presupposes a divine image, and renders an _aedituus_ necessary.
********************************************
government should be so all-pervading in such matters. At this
period most of the sanctuaries were public, but not therefore as
yet on that account royal, and so also doubtless there were
numerous priests who were not servants of the king. The
preponderance of official cultus and of an official personnel to
carry it on was counteracted in the northern kingdom by the
frequent dynastic changes and the unattached particularism of the
separate tribes; the conditions may be presumed to have
developed themselves with great variety and freedom, hereditary
and unhereditary priests, priests with independent benefices and
others in complete poverty, subsisting side by side; the variety
and the equality of rights enjoyed by all is the distinguishing
mark of the time.
Speaking generally, however, the priesthood has distinctly
consolidated itself as compared with its former condition, and
gained not a little alike in number and in influence; it has become
an important power in public life, without which the nation cannot
be imagined. It would perhaps be somewhat bold to assert this
on the strength merely of the brief and inadequate indications
in the Book of Kings, which is chiefly interested in the extraordinary
interventions of the prophets in the course of Israel's history,
but other and more authentic testimonies justify us in doing so.
First of these is the Blessing of Moses, an independent document
of northern Israel which speaks for itself. Here we read:
"Thy Thummim and thy Urim belong to the man of thy friendship,
whom thou didst prove at Massah,
for whom thou didst strive at the waters of Meribah;
who saith of father and mother,
I have never seen them,
and acknowledgeth not his brethren
nor knoweth his own children--
for they observe thy word
and keep thy covenant,
they teach Jacob thy judgments
and Israel thy law;
they bring savour of fat before thee
and whole burnt sacrifice upon thine altar;
bless, O Lord, his strength,
and accept the work of his hands;
smite through the loins of them that rise up against him,
and of them that hate him that they rise not again"
(Deuteronomy xxxiii. 8-11).
In this passage the priests appear as a strictly close corporation,
so close that they are mentioned only exceptionally in the plural
number, and for the most part are spoken of collectively in the
singular, as an organic unity which embraces not merely the
contemporary members, but also their ancestors, and which begins
its life with Moses, the friend of Jehovah who as its beginning
is identified with the continuation just as the man is identified
with the child out of which he has grown. The history of Moses
is at the same time the history of the priests, the Urim and Thummim
belong--one is not quite sure to which, but it comes to the same
thing; every priest to whom the care of an ephod has been intrusted
interrogates before it the sacred oracle. The first relative clause
relating to Moses passes over without change of subject into one
that refers to the priests, so that the singular immediately falls
into plural and the plural back to the singular. Yet this so
strongly marked solidarity of the priesthood as a profession rests
by no means upon the natural basis of family or clan unity; it is
not blood, but on the contrary the abnegation of blood that constitutes
the priest, as is brought out with great emphasis. He must act for
Jehovah's sake as if he had neither father nor mother, neither
brethren nor children. Blind prepossession in people's conceptions
of Judaism has hitherto prevented the understanding of these words,
but they are thoroughly unambiguous. What they say is, that in
consecrating himself to the service of Jehovah a man abandons his
natural relationships, and severs himself from family ties;
thus, with the brotherhood of the priests in northern Israel the
case is precisely similar as with that of the religious guilds of
the sons of the prophets--the Rechabites, and doubtless too the
Nazarites (Amos ii. 11 seq.)--also native there. Whosoever chose
(or, whomsoever he chose) was made priest by Jeroboam--such is the
expression of the Deuteronomic redactor of the Book of Kings
(1Kings xiii. 33). A historical example of what has been said is
afforded by the young Samuel, as he figures in the narrative of
his early years contained in 1Samuel i.-iii.--a narrative which
certainly reflects the condition of things in Ephraim at the period
of the monarchy. The child of a well-to-do middle class family
at Ramah, in the district of Zuph Ephraim, he is even before his
birth vowed to Jehovah by his mother, and as soon as possible
afterwards is handed over to the sanctuary at Shiloh,--not to
become a Nazarite or one of the Nethinim in the sense of the
Pentateuch, but to be a priest,--for in his ministry he wears
the linen ephod, the _ephod bad_, and even
the pallium (1Samuel ii. 18) /1/ And it is made very plain that
***********************************************
1. Comp. Koran, iii. 31: "I vow to thee that which is in my
womb as a devotee of the mosque, to serve it."
*[pallium. "1.Antiq. A large rectangular cloak or mantle worn by men'
chiefly among the Greeks; esp. by philosophers and by early Christian
ascetics...Himation...2.Eccl. A vestment of wool worn by patriarchs
and metropolitans... SOED. Heb. m(yl q+n ii.19?]*
**********************************************
the mother's act, in thus giving up her son, who is properly
hers, or (as she expresses it) lending him to Jehovah for ever
(1Samuel i. 28: #MW)L=MW#)L), is regarded as a renunciation
of family rights. The circumstance that it is by the parents
and not by Samuel himself that the consecration is made makes
no material difference; the one thing is on the same plane with
the other, and doubtless occurred as well as the other, although
seldomer. But, on the other hand, it can hardly have been the
rule that any one should abandon not parents and brethren merely,
but also wife and children as well in order to enter the priesthood;
in Deuteronomy xxxiii. 9 this is adduced only as an extreme instance
of the spirit of self-sacrifice. In any case it is not to be
inferred that celibacy was demanded, but only that the priestly
office was often barely sufficient to support the man, not to
speak of a family.
So fixed and influential, so independent and exclusive had the
priesthood become at the date of the composition of the Blessing
of Moses, that it takes a place of its own alongside of the tribes
of the nation, is itself a tribe, constituted, however, not by
blood, but by community of spiritual interests. Its importance
is brought into clearness even by the opposition which it
encounters, and which occasions so vigorous a denunciation of its
enemies that one might well believe the person who committed it to
writing to have been himself a priest. The cause of the hostility
is not stated, but it seems to be directed simply against the
very existence of a professional and firmly organised clergy,
and to proceed from laymen who hold fast by the rights of the old
priestless days.
Next to the Blessing of Moses the discourses of Hosea contain our
most important materials for an estimate of the priesthood of
Northern Israel. How important that institution was for public
life is clear from his expressions also. The priests are the
spiritual leaders of the people; the reproach that they do not fulfil
their high vocation proves in the first place that they have it.
Degenerate they are, to be sure; in Hosea's representation they
are seen in the same light as that in which the sons of Eli appear
as described in 1Samuel ii. 22 seq., from which description one
conjectures the author to have derived his colours from a state of
matters nearer his own day than the period of the judges. The
priests of Shechem are even taxed by the prophet with open highway
robbery (vi. 9), and in one charge after another he accuses them
of taking advantage of their office for base gain, of neglecting
its most sacred duties, and in this way having the principal
blame for the ruin of the people.
"Hear the word of Jehovah, ye children of Israel,
for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land,
because there is no truth, nor mercy,
nor knowledge of God in the land.
(2.) There is swearing, and Iying, and killing,
and stealing, and committing adultery;
they use violence and add murder to murder.
(3.) Therefore the land mourneth,
and every creature that dwelleth therein languisheth,
even to the wild beasts of the field
and the fowls of heaven;
and even the fishes of the sea are taken away.
(4.) Yet let no man strive
and no man reprove;
for the people do just as their priests.
(5.) Therefore shall ye (priests) stumble on that day,
and also the prophets with you on that night;
and I will destroy your kin.
(6.) My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,
because ye yourselves reject knowledge;
I will therefore reject you that ye shall be no longer priests unto me;
ye have forgotten the doctrine of your God,
so will I forget your children.
(7.) The more they are,
the more they sin against me;
their glory they turn into shame.
(8.) They eat up the sin of my people,
and they set their heart on their iniquity.
(9.) And it shall be as with the people so with the priest;
I will punish them for their ways
and requite them for their doings.
(10.) They shall eat and not have enough,
they shall commit whoredom and shall not increase,
because they have ceased to take heed to the Lord"
(Hosea iv. 1-10). /1/
**********************************************
1. In the introductory words the people are invited to hear what it
is that Jehovah complains of them for; sin prevails to such an
extent that the complete ruin of the country is inevitable (vers.
1-3). With the word "yet" at the beginning of the following verse
the prophet changes the course of his thought; from the people he
passes to the priests; the root of the general corruption is the
want of divine knowledge (the knowledge, namely, that "I will have
mercy and not sacrifice; "compare Jeremiah xxii. 16), and for this
the priests are to blame, whose task it was to diffuse "knowledge,"
but who, instead of this for their own selfish interests fostered
the tendency of the people to seek Jehovah's grace by sacrifice
rather than by righteousness. For if it be conceded that it is
the priests who are addressed from ver. 6 onwards, then it is not
easy to see why a change in the address should take place between
ver. 5 and ver. 6, especially as the co-ordination of priests
with prophets seems more reasonable in ver. 5 than that of prophets
and people. As ver. 4 in this way occupies an intermediate position
between the complaint made against the people in vers. 1-3, and
that against the priests in vers. 5-10, the transition from the one
to the other, indicated by the "yet," must occur in it. Hosea
abruptly breaks off from reproaching the people, "Yet let no man
strive and no man reprove"--why not, the words that follow must
explain. In verse 4b some circumstance must be mentioned which
excuses the people, and at the same time draws down indignation
upon the priests who are the subjects of the following. These
considerations necessarily determine the thought which we are
to expect, namely, this--"for the people do just as their priests."
This meaning is obtained by the conjectural reading W(MY KKMRYW
instead of W(MKKMRYB. Comp. ver. 9. The remaining YKH must be
deleted. The ordinary view of ver. 4 is hardly worth refuting.
The )L YWKH, it is said, is spoken from the people's point of view.
The people repel the prophet's reproach and rebuke, because
(such is the interpretation of ver. 4b) they themselves have no
scruples in striving EVEN with the priest. "Even," for want of
subjection to the priests is held to be specially wicked.
But the prophet Hosea would hardly have considered it a capital
offence if the people had withheld from the priests the respect
of which, according to his own language, they were so utterly
unworthy. Moreover, every exegesis which finds in ver. 4 a
reproach brought against the people, leaves in obscurity the point
at which the transition is made from reproach of the people
to reproach of the priests.
***********************************************
In the northern kingdom, according to this, the spiritual
ascendancy of the priests over the people seems hardly to have
been less than that of the prophets, and if in the history we
hear less about it, /1/ the explanation is to be sought in the
********************************************
1. According to 2Kings xvii. 27, 28, the foreign colonies
introduced by the Assyrians into Samaria after it had been
depopulated, were at first devoured by lions because they were
ignorant of the right way of honouring the deity of the land.
Esarhaddon therefore sent one of the exiled Samaritan priests, who
fixed his abode at Bethel, the ancient chief sanctuary, and
instructed (MWRH) the settlers in the religion of the god of the
country. This presupposes a definite priesthood, which
maintained itself even in exile for a considerable time.
*******************************************
fact that they laboured quietly and regularly in limited
circles, taking no part in politics, and fully submissive to the
established order, and that for this reason they attracted less
notice and were less talked about than the prophets who, like
Elijah and Elisha, stirred up Israel by their extraordinary and
oppositional action.
IV.II.4. In Judah the nucleus of the development was the same as in
Israel. The idea that in Judah the genuine Mosaic priesthood had
by the grace of God been maintained, while in Israel, on the other
hand, a schismatic priesthood had intruded itself by the favour
of the king and man's device, is that of the later Judaeans who
had the last word, and were therefore of course in the right. The
B'ne Zadok of Jerusalem as contrasted with the B'ne Eli whom they
superseded were originally illegitimate (if one may venture to
apply a conception which at that time was quite unknown), and did
not inherit their right from the fathers, but had it from David
and Solomon. They always remained in this dependent condition,
they at all times walked, as 1Samuel ii. 35 has it, "before
Jehovah's anointed," as his servants and officers. To the kings
the temple was a part of their palace which, as is shown by
1Kings vii. and 2Kings xi., stood upon the same hill and was
contiguous with it; they placed their threshold alongside of
that of Jehovah, and made their door-posts adjoin to His, so that
only the wall intervened between Jehovah and them (Ezekiel xliii.
8). They shaped the official cultus entirely as they chose,
and regarded the management of it, at least so far as one gathers
from the epitome of the "Book of the Kings," as the main business
of their government. They introduced new usages and abolished old
ones; and as they did so the priests always bent to their will
and were merely their executive organs. /1/ That they were at
*******************************************
1. Compare for example 2Kings xii. 5 seq. (Joash and Jehoiada),
xvi. 10 seq. Ahaz and Urijah), and, finally, chap. xxii.
(Josiah and Hilkiah).
******************************************
liberty to offer sacrifice also is a thing of course; they did
it, however, only on exceptional occasions, such as, perhaps, at
the dedication of a new altar (2Kings xvi. 12, 13). Even with
Jeremiah, who as a rule does not consider sacrifice and drawing
near to Jehovah (Numbers xvi 5) as every man's business, the king
as such is held to be also the supreme priest; for at the
beginning of the exile and the foreign domination his hope for the
future is: "Their potentate shall be of themselves, and their
governor shall proceed from the midst of them, and I will cause
him to draw near, and he shall approach unto me; for who else
should have the courage to approach unto me? saith the Lord"
(xxx. 21). Ezekiel is the first to protest against dealing with
the temple as a royal dependency; for him the prerogative of the
prince is reduced to this, that it is his duty to support the
public cultus at his own expense.
The distinction between the Judaean and the Israelite priesthood
did not exist at first, but arose out of the course of events.
The sheltered and quiet life of the little state in the south
presents a marked contrast with the external and internal conflicts,
the easily raised turmoil, of the northern kingdom. In the latter,
the continual agitation brought extraordinary personalities up
to the surface; in the former, institutions based upon the permanent
order of things and supported by permanent powers were consolidated./1/
*************************************************
1. The Rechabites, who arose in the northern kingdom, continued to
subsist in Judah, and Jeremiah prophesied to them that there
should never fail them a priestly head of the family of their
founder (xxxv. 19).
**************************************************
Naturally the monarchy itself benefited most by this stability.
The king's cultus, which in the kingdom of Samaria was in no
position to supersede the popular and independent worship,
easily obtained a perceptible preponderance in the smaller Judah;
the king's priesthood, which in the former was incidentally involved
in disaster by the overthrow of the dynasty, in the latter gained
in strength side by side with the house of David--even Aaron
and Amminadab were according to the Priestly Code related to the
royal family, as Jehoiada and Ahaziah were in actual fact.
Thus at an early period was the way paved for the Act of Uniformity
by which Josiah made the king's cultus the official and the only one.
One effect which accompanied the measures he took was naturally the
exclusive legitimation of the king's priesthood at Jerusalem. But
the principle of heredity had already pervaded the other priestly
families so thoroughly that to enter any secular calling was
nowhere expected of them. The Deuteronomic legislator had
conferred upon them the right of carrying on their office at
Jerusalem, and of executing it there on behalf of any one who
requested their services; but this regulation, from the opposition
of the B'ne Zadok, was found on the whole impracticable (2Kings
xxiii. 9), although doubtless some extraneous elements may at
that time have succeeded in making their way into the temple
nobility. The bulk of the priests of the high places who had been
superseded had to content themselves (since they could not now
get rid of their spiritual character) with being degraded among
their brethren at Jerusalem, and with admission to a subordinate
share in the service of the sanctuary (comp. 1Samuel ii. 36).
It was thus, at the close of the pre-exilic history, that the
distinction between priests and Levites arose to which Ezekiel
is at pains to give the sanction of law.
IV.III.
IV.III.1. On the whole it is easy here to bring the successive strata
of the Pentateuch into co-ordination with the recognisable steps
of the historical development. In the Jehovistic legislation
there is no word of priests (Exodus xx.-xxiii., xxxiv.), and even
such precepts as "Thou shalt not go up by steps unto mine altar,
that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon " (Exodus xx. 26)
are directed to the general "thou," that is, to the people. With
this corresponds the fact that in the solemn ratification of the
covenant of Sinai (Exodus xxiv. 3-8), it is young men of the
children of Israel who officiate as sacrificers. Elsewhere in the
Jehovist Aaron (Exodus iv. 14, xxxii. 1 seq.) and Moses (xxxiii.
7-lI; Deuteronomy xxxiii. 8) figure as the founders of the clerical
order. Twice (in Exodus xix. 22 and xxxii 29) mention is made of
other priests besides; but Exodus xxxii. 29 rests upon
Deuteronomy, and even Exodus xix. 22 can hardly have been an
original constituent of one of the Jehovistic sources.
IV.III.2. In Deuteronomy the priests, as compared with the judges and
the prophets, take a very prominent position (xvi. 18-xviii. 22)
and constitute a clerical order, hereditary in numerous families,
whose privilege is uncontested and therefore also does not require
protection. Here now for the first time begins the regular use of
the name of Levites for the priests,--a name of which the
consideration has been postponed until now.
In the pre-exilic literature apart from the Pentateuch it occurs
very seldom. First in the prophets, once in the Book of Jeremiah
(xxxiii. 17-22), in a passage which in any case is later than
the capture of Jerusalem by the Chaldaeans, and certainly was
not written by Jeremiah. /1/ The use of the name is an
**********************************************
1. In the LXX, chap. xxxiii. 14-26 is wanting. The parallelism
between vers. 17-22 and 23-26 is striking. It looks as if David
and Levi arose out of a misunderstanding of the families mentioned
in ver. 24, namely, Judah and Ephraim. In any case wdwd in ver.
26 is an interpolation.
************************************************
established thing in Ezekiel (573 B.C.), and henceforward occurs
without interruption in the writings of the later prophets, a sign
that its earlier absence is not to be explained as accidental, not
even in Jeremiah, who speaks so frequently of the priests. /2/
********************************************
1. Ezekiel xl. 46, xliii. 19, xliv. 10, 15, xlv. 5, xlviii.
11-13, 22, 31; Isaiah lxvi. 21; Zechariah xii. 13; Malachi
ii. 4, 8, iii. 3.
*******************************************
In the historical books the Levites (leaving out of account
1Samuel vi. 15, 2Samuel xv. 24, and 1Kings viii. 4, xii. 31) /1/
**********************************************
1. Upon 1Samuel vi. 15 all that is necessary has been said at IV.II.1;
on 1Kings viii. 4 see. I.III.1. That 1Kings xii. 31
proceeds from the Deuteronomic redactor, the date of whose writing
is not earlier than the second half of the exile, needs no proof.
The hopeless corruptness of 2Samuel xv. 24 I have shown in Text. d.
BB. Sam. (Goettingen, 1871).
******************************************
occur only in the two appendices to the Book of Judges (chaps.
xvii., xviii., and xix., xx.), of which, however, the second is
unhistorical and late, and only the first is certainly
pre-exilic. But in this case it is not the Levites who are spoken
of, as elsewhere, but A LEVITE, who passes for a great rarity,
and who is forcibly carried off by the tribe of Dan, which has
none.
Now this Jonathan, the ancestor of the priests of Dan,
notwithstanding that he belongs to the tribe of Judah, is
represented as a descendant of Gershom the son of Moses (Judges
xviii. 30). The other ancient priestly family that goes back
to the period of the Judges, the Ephraimitic, of Shiloh, appears
also to be brought into connection with Moses; at least in 1Samuel
ii. 27 (a passage, however, which is certainly post-Deuteronomic),
where Jehovah is spoken of as having made himself known to the
ancestors of Eli in Egypt, and as thereby having laid the foundation
for the bestowal of the priesthood, it is clearly Moses who is
thought of as the recipient of the revelation. Historical
probability admits of the family being traced back to Phinehas,
who during the early period of the judges was priest of the ark,
and from whom the inheritance on Mount Ephraim and also the second
son of Eli were named; it is not to be supposed that he is the
mere shadow of his younger namesake, as the latter predeceased his
father and was of quite secondary importance beside him. But
Phinehas is both in the Priestly Code and in Josh. xxiv. 33 (E)
the son of Eleazar, and Eleazar is, according to normal tradition,
indeed a son of Aaron, but according to the sound of his name
(Eliezer) a son of Moses along with Gershom. Between Aaron and
Moses in the Jehovistic portion of the Pentateuch no great
distinction is made; if Aaron, in contradistinction from his
brother, is characterised as THE LEVITE (Exodus iv. 14), Moses on
the other hand bears the priestly staff, is over the sanctuary,
and has Joshua to assist him as Eli had Samuel (Exodus xxxiii.
7-11). Plainly the older claims are his; in the main Jehovistic
source, in J, Aaron originally does not occur at all, /2/ neither
**************************************
1. That Aaron was not originally present in J, but owed his
introduction to tile redactor who combined J nnd E together into
JE, can be shown best from Exod vii. x. For Jehovah's COMMAND
to appear before Pharaoh is in J given to Moses alone (vii. 14, 26
[viii. 1], viii. 16 [20], ix. 1, 13, x. 1); it is only in the
sequel that Aaron appears along with him four times, always when
Pharaoh in distress summons Moses and Aaron in order to ask their
intercession. But strangely enough Aaron is afterwards completely
ignored again; Moses alone makes answer, speaking solely in his
own name and not in Aaron's also (viii. 5, 22, 25 [9, 26, 29];
ix. 29), and although he has not come alone ; he goes so and makes
his prayer in the singular (viii. 8, 26 [12, 30], ix. 33, x. 18),
the change of the number in x. 17 is under these circumstances
suspicious enough. It appears as if the Jehovistic editor had held
Aaron's presence to be appropriate precisely at the intercession.
***********************************
is he mentioned in Deuteronomy xxxiii. 8. In the genealogies of
the Priestly Code one main branch of the tribe of Levi is still
called, like the eldest son of Moses, Gershom, and another important
member is actually called Mushi, 2:e., the Mosaite.
It is not impossible that the holy office may have continued in
the family of Moses, and it is very likely that the two oldest
houses in which it was hereditary, those at Dan and at Shiloh,
may have claimed in all seriousness to have been descended from him.
Afterwards, as Deuteronomy xxxiii. 8 seq. informs us, all priests
honoured Moses as their father, not as being the head of their clan
but as being the founder of their order. The same took place in
Judah, but there the clerical guild ultimately acquired a hereditary
character, and the order became a sort of clan. _Levite_,
previously an official name, now became a patronymic at the same
time, and all the Levites together formed a blood-kinship, /1/
**********************************************
1. The instance of the Rechabites shows how easily the transition
could made.
**********************************************
a race which had not received any land of its own indeed, but in
compensation had obtained the priesthood for its heritage. This
hereditary clergy was alleged to have existed from the very beginning
of the history of Israel, and even then as a numerous body, consisting
of many others besides Moses and Aaron. Such is the representation
made by Deuteronomist and subsequent writers, but in Deuteronomy
we read chiefly of the _Levites_ in the provincial towns of Judah
and of the _priests_, the _Levites_ in Jerusalem, seldom of Levi
as a whole (x. 8 seq., xviii. 1) /2/
************************************************
2. On Deut xxvii. compare Kuenen, Theol. Tidjdschr., 1878, p. 297.
***********************************************
That the hereditary character of the priesthood is here antedated
and really first arose in the later period of the Kings, has
already been shown in the particular instance of the sons of Zadok
of Jerusalem, who were at first parvenus and afterwards became
the most legitimate of the legitimate. But it is very remarkable
how this artificial construction of a priestly family,--a
construction which has absolutely nothing perplexing in itself--
was suggested and favoured by the circumstance that in remote
antiquity there once actually did exist a veritable tribe
of Levi which had already disappeared before the period of the
rise of the monarchy. This tribe belonged to the group of the
four oldest sons of Leah,--Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah,--who are
always enumerated together in this order, and who settled on both
sides of the Dead Sea, towards the wilderness. Singularly no one
of them succeeded in holding its own except Judah; all the others
became absorbed among the inhabitants of the wilderness or in
other branches of their kindred. The earliest to find this
destiny were the two tribes of Simeon and Levi (in Genesis xlix.
regarded as one), in consequence of a catastrophe which must have
befallen them at some time during the period of the judges.
"Simeon and Levi are brethren,
their shepherds' staves are weapons of slaughter;
O my soul, come not thou into their assembly!
mine honour, be thou far from their band!
for they slew men in their anger,
and in their self-will they houghed oxen;
cursed be their anger--so fierce!
and their wrath--so cruel!
I will divide them in Jacob
and scatter them over Israel!"
(Genesis xlix.5-7).
The offence of Simeon and Levi here rebuked cannot have been
committed against Israelites, for in such a case the thought
could not have occurred, which is here emphatically repelled,
that Jacob, that is to say, Israel as a whole, could have made
common cause with them. What is here spoken of must be some crime
against the Canaanites, very probably the identical crime which
is charged upon the two brothers in Genesis xxxiv., and which there
also Jacob (ver. 30) repudiates,--the treacherous attack upon
Shechem and massacre of its inhabitants, in disregard of the
treaty which had been made. In Judges ix. it is related that
Shechem, until then a flourishing town of the Canaanites, with
whom moreover Israelite elements were already beginning to blend,
was conquered and destroyed by Abimelech, but it is quite
impossible to bring into any connection with this the violent deed
of Simeon and Levi, which must have taken place earlier, although
also within the period of the judges. The consequences of their
act, the vengeance of the Canaanites, the two tribes had to bear
alone; Israel, according to the indication given in Genesis xlix.
6, xxxiv. 30, did not feel any call to interfere on their behalf
or make common cause with them. Thus they fell to pieces and
passed out of sight,--in the opinion of their own nation a just
fate. In the historical books they are never again mentioned.
It is quite impossible to regard this Levi of the Book of Genesis
as a mere shadow of the caste which towards the end of the monarchy
arose out of the separate priestly families of Judah. The utterance
given in Genesis xlix. 5-7 puts the brothers on an exact equality,
and assigns to them an extremely secular and blood-thirsty character.
There is not the faintest idea of Levi's sacred calling or of his
dispersion as being conditioned thereby; the dispersion is a curse
and no blessing, an annihilation and no establishment of his special
character. But it is equally an impossibility to derive the caste
from the tribe; there is no real connection between the two, all
the intermediate links are wanting; the tribe succumbed at an
early date, and the rise of the caste was very late, and demonstrably
from unconnected beginnings. But in these circumstances the
coincidence of name is also very puzzling: Levi the third son of
Jacob, perhaps a mere patronymic derived form his mother Leah,
and levi the official priest. If it were practicable to find
a convincing derivation of levi in its later use from the
appellative meaning of the root, then one might believe the
coincidence to be merley fortuitous, but it is impossible to do
so. the solution therefore has been suggested that the violent
dissolution of the tribe in the period of the judges led the
individual Levites, who now were landless, to seek their maintenance
by the exercise of sacrificial functions; this lay to their hand
and was successful because Moses them an of God had belonged
to their number and had transmitted to them by hereditary
succession a certain preferential claim to the sacred office.
But at that time priestly posts were not numerous, and such
an entrance of the levites _en masse_ into the service of Jehovah
in that early time is in view of the infrequency of the larger
sanctuaries a very difficult assumption. It is perhaps correct
to say that Moses actually was descended from Levi, and that the
later significance of the name Levite is to be explained by
reference to him. In point of fact, the name does appear to
have been given in the first instance only to the descendants of
Moses, and not to have been transferred until a later period
to those priests as a body, who were quite unconnected with him
by blood, but who all desired to stand related to him as their
head. Here it will never be possible to get beyond conjecture.
IV.III.3 While the clerical _tribe of the Levites_ is still
brought forward only modestly in Deuteronomy (x. 8 seq.
xviii. 1; Joshua xiii. 14, 33), it is dealt with in very real
earnest in the Priestly Code. The _tribe of Levi_ (Numbers i. 47,
49, iii. 6, xvii. 3, xviii. 2) is given over by the remaining
tribes to the sanctuary, is catalogued according to the genealogical
system of its families, reckons 22,000 male members, and even
receives a sort of tribal territory, the forty-eight Levitical
cities (Josh. xxi.). At the beginning of this chapter we have
already spoken of a forward step made in the Priestly Code,
connected with this enlargement of the clergy, but of much greater
importance; hitherto the distinction has been between clergy
and laity, while here there is introduced the great division
of the order itself into sons of Aaron and Levites.
Not in Deuteronomy only, but everywhere in the Old Testament,
apart from Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles, Levite is the priest's
title of honour. /1/ Aaron himself is so styled in the
************************************************
1. Exodus iv. 14; Deuteronomy xxxiii. 8; Judges xvii. seq.;
Exodus xxxii. 26-28; Deuteronomy x. 8 seq., xii. 12, 18 seq.
xiv. 27, 29, xvi. 11, 14, xvii. 9, 18, xviii. 1-8, xxiv. 8,
xxvii. 9, 14, xxxi. 9, 25; Joshua iii. 3,xiii. 14, 33, xiv. 3 seq.,
xviii. 7; Judges xix. seq., 1Samuel v1. 15; 1Kings xii. 31,
Jeremiah xxxiii 17-22; Ezekiel xliv. 8 seq.; Isaiah lxvi. 2,
Zechariah xii. 13, Malachi Ii. 4, 8, iii. 3. Only the glosses
2Samuel xv. 24, and 1Kings viii. 4 (compare, however, 2Chronicles
v. 5) can rest upon the Priestly Code.
********************************************
often-quoted passage, Exodus iv. 14, and that too to denote his
calling, not his family, for the latter he has in common with
Moses, from whom, nevertheless, it is intended to distinguish him
by the style, "thy brother the Levite." In Deuteronomy we are
struck by the deliberate emphasis laid on the equal right of all
the Levites to sacrificial service in Jerusalem--
"The priests, the Levites, the whole tribe of Levi, shall have
no portion or inheritance with Israel; they shall eat the
offerings of Jehovah and his inheritance....And if a Levite come
from any of thy cities out of all Israel, where he sojourned,
and come to the place which Jehovah shall choose, then he shall
minister in the name of Jehovah his God as all his brethren the
Levites do who stand there before Jehovah"
(Deuteronomy xviii. 1, 6, 7). Here the legislator has in view
his main enactment, viz., the abolition of all places of worship
except the temple of Solomon; those who had hitherto been the
priests of these could not be allowed to starve. Therefore
it is that he impresses it so often and so earnestly on the people
of the provinces that in their sacrificial pilgrimages to Jerusalem
they ought not to forget the Levite of their native place, but
should carry him with them. For an understanding of the subsequent
development this is very important, in so far as it shows how the
position of the Levites outside of Jerusalem was threatened by
the centralisation of the worship. In point of fact, the good
intention of the Deuteronomist proved impossible of realisation;
with the high places fell also the priests of the high places.
In so far as they continued to have any part at all in the sacred
service, they had to accept a position of subordination under
the sons of Zadok (2Kings xxiii. 9). Perhaps Graf was correct
in referring to this the prophecy of 1Samuel ii. 36 according
to which the descendants of the fallen house of Eli are to come
to the firmly established regius priest, to beg for an alms,
or to say, "Put me, I pray thee, into one of the priests' offices,
that I may eat a piece of bread:" that historically the deposed
Levites had no very intimate connection with those ancient
companions in misfortune is no serious objection to such an
interpretation in the case of a post-Deuteronomic writer.
In this way arose as an illegal consequence of Josiah's
reformation, the distinction between priests and Levites.
With Ezekiel this distinction is still an innovation requiring
justification and sanction; with the Priestly Code it is a
"statute for ever," although even yet not absolutely undisputed,
as appears from the Priestly version of the story of Korah's
company. /1/ For all Judaism subsequent to Ezra, and so for
***********************************************
1. Distorted references to the historical truth are round also in
Numbers xvii. 25 and xviii. 23, passages which are unintelligible
apart from Ezekiel xliv. Compare Kuenen, Theol. Tijdschr., 1878,
p. 138 seq.
*********************************************
Christian tradition, the Priestly Code in this matter also has
been authoritative. Instead of the Deuteronomic formula "the
priests the Levites," we henceforward have "the priests and
the Levites," particularly in Chronicles, /2/ and in the
***********************************************
2. Except in 2 Chrom v. 5, xxx. 27.
*********************************************
ancient versions the old _usus_ loquendi is frequently corrected. /3/
*********************************************
3. E.g., Josh. iii. 3 and Isaiah lxvi. 21 in the LXX, Deuteronomy
xviii. 1 and Judges xvii. 13 in "Jerome; and many passages in
the Syriac. On the carrying out of the new organisation of
the temple _personnel_ after the exile, see Vatke, p. 568, Graf (in
Merx's Archiv, i., p. 225 seq.), and Kuenen (Godsdienst, ii. p. 104
seq ). With Zerubbabel and Joshua, four priestly families,
4289 persons in all, returned from Babylon in 538 (Ezra iv. 36-39);
with Ezra in 458 came two families in addition, but the number
of persons is not stated (viii. 2). Of Levites there came on the
first occasion 74 (ii. 40); on the second, of the 1500 men who
met at the rendezvous appointed by Ezra to make the journey
through the wilderness, not one was a Levite, and it was only
on the urgent representations of the scribe that some thirty
were at last induced to join the company (viii. 15-20). How can
we explain this preponderance of priests over Levites, which
is still surprising even if the individual figures are not
to be taken as exact? Certainly it cannot be accounted for
if the state of matters for a thousand years had been that
represented in the Priestly Code and in Chronicles. On the
other hand, all perplexity vanishes if the Levites were the
degraded priests of the high places of Judah. These were
certainly not on the whole more numerous than the Jerusalem
college, and the prospect of thenceforward not being permitted
to sacrifice in their native land, but of having slaughtering
and washing for sole duties, cannot have been in any way very
attractive to them; one can hardly blame them if they were
disinclined voluntarily to lower themselves to the position
of mere laborers under the sons of Zadok. Besides, it may be
taken for granted that many (and more particularly Levitical)
elements not originally belonging to it had managed to make way
into the ranks of the Solomonic priesthood; that all were not
successful (Ezra ii. 61) shows that many made the attempt, and
considering the ease with which genealogies hoary with age were
then manufactured and accepted, every such attempt cannot have
failed.
How then came it to pass that afterwards, as one must conclude
from the statements in Chronicles, the Levites stood to the priests
in a proportion so much more nearly, if even then not quite fully
corresponding to the law? Simply by the "Levitising" of alien
families. At first in the community of the second temple the
Levites continued to be distinguished from the singers, porters,
and Nethinim (Ezra ii. 41-58), guilds which from the outset were
much more numerous and which rapidly grew (Nehemiah xi. 17, 19, 36,
xii. 28 seq.; 1Chronicles ix. 16, 22, 25). But the distinction
had in fact no longer any actual basis, once the Levites had been
degraded to the rank of temple-servitors and become Nethinim to the
priests (Numbers iii. 9). Hence, where the Chronicler, who is at
the same time the author of the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, is not
reproducing old sources but is writing freely, he regards the
singers also and the porters as Levites. By artificial genealogies
of rather a rough and ready kind the three families of singers,
Heman, Asaph, and Ethan are traced up (1Chronicles v1.. 1 seq.)
to the old Levitical families of Kohath, Gershon, and Merari
(see Graf, as above, p. 231; and Ewald, iii. p. 380 seq.).
How far the distinction between the Nethinim and the Levites
was afterwards maintained (Josh. ix. 21 seq., I Esdras i. 3;
Ezra viii. 20) is not clear. It would not be amiss if Ezekiel's
intention of banishing foreigners from the temple found its
fulfilment only through these heathen hieroduli, the Mehunim,
the Nephisim, the sons of Shalmai, and the others whose
foreign-sounding names are given in Ezra ii. 43 seq.,
obtaining admission into the tribe of Levi by artificial
genealogies. A peculiar side light is thrown upon the course
of development by the fact that the singers who in Ezra's time
were not yet even Levites, afterwards felt shame in being so, and
desired at least externally to be placed on all equality with
priests. They begged of King Agrippa II. to obtain for them the
permission of the synedrium to wear the white priestly dress.
***********************************************
The copestone of the sacred structure reared by the legislation of
the middle books of the Pentateuch is the high priest. As the
Aaronites are above the Levites so is Aaron himself above his
sons; in his person culminates thc development of the unity of
worship inaugurated by Deuteronomy and the agency of Josiah.
No figure of such incomparable importance occurs anywhere else in
the Old Testament; a high priest of pre-eminent sanctity is still
unknown to Ezekiel even. Even before the exile, it is true, the
temple worship at Jerusalem had become so magnificent and its
personnel so numerous as to render necessary an orderly division
of offices and a gradation of ranks. In Jeremiah's time
the priests constituted a guild divided into classes or families
with elders at their head; the principal priest had a potent
voice in the appointment of his inferior colleagues (1Samuel ii.
36); alongside of him stood the second priest, the keepers of the
threshold, the captain of the watch as holders of prominent
charges. /1/ But in the Law the position of Aaron is not merely
***********************************************
I The Kohen ha-rosh first occurs in 2Samuel xv. 27, but here HR)#
(so read, instead of HRW)H) comes from the interpolator of ver. 24.
So again 2Kings xii. 11, HKHN HGDWL, but 2Kings xii. is from the
same hand as 2Kings xvi. 10 seq. Elsewhere we have simply "the priest,"
compare besides 2Kings xix. 2; Jeremiah xix. 1; 2Kings xxiii. 4; xxv. 18;
Jeremiah xx. 1; xxix. 25, 26; In 1Samuel ii. 36 SPXNY "incorporate
me" shows that KHNH must mean "priestly guild" or "order." In
connection with the name LWY it is noteworthy that SPX is parallel
with LWH in Isaiah xiv. 1.
**********************************************
superior but unique, like that of the Pope in relation to the
episcopate; his sons act under his oversight (Numbers iii. 4); he
alone is the one fully qualified priest, the embodiment of all
that is holy in Israel He alone bears the Urim and Thummim and
the Ephod; the Priestly Code indeed no longer knows what those
articles are for, and it confounds the ephod of gold with the
ephod of linen, the plated image with the priestly robe; but the
dim recollections of these serve to enhance the magical charm of
Aaron's majestic adornment. He alone may enter into the holy of
holies and there offer incense; the way at other times
inaccessible (Nehemiah vi. 10, 11) is open to him on the great day
of atonement. Only in him, at a single point and in a single
moment, has Israel immediate contact with Jehovah. The apex of
the pyramid touches heaven.
The high priest stands forth as absolutely sovereign in his own
domain. Down to the exile, as we have seen, the sanctuary was the
property of the king, and the priest was his servant; even in
Ezekiel who on the whole is labouring towards emancipation, the
prince has nevertheless a very great importance in the temple
still; to him the dues of the people are paid, and the
sacrificial expenses are in return defrayed by him. In the
Priestly Code, on the other hand, the dues are paid direct into
the sanctuary, the worship is perfectly autonomous, and has its
own head, holding not from man but from the grace of God. Nor is
it merely the autonomy of religion that is represented by the high
priest; he exhibits also its supremacy over Israel. He does not
carry sceptre and sword; nowhere, as Vatke (p. 539) well
remarks, is any attempt made to claim for him secular power. But
just in virtue of his spiritual dignity, as the head of the priesthood,
he is head of the theocracy, and so much so that there is no room
for any other alongside of him; a theocratic king beside him cannot
be thought of (Numbers xxvii. 21). He alone is the responsible
representative of the collective nation, the names of the twelve
tribes are written on his breast and shoulders; his transgression
involves the whole people in guilt, and is atoned for as that of
the whole people, while the princes, when their sin-offerings are
compared with his, appear as mere private persons (Leviticus iv. 3,
13, 22, ix. 7, xvi. 6). His death makes an epoch; it is when the
high priest--not the king--dies that the fugitive slayer obtains
his amnesty (Numbers xxxv. 28). At his investiture he receives
the chrism like a king, and is called accordingly the anointed
priest; he is adorned with the diadem and tiara (Ezekiel xxi. 31,
A.V. 26) like a king, and like a king too he wears the purple,
that most unpriestly of all raiment, of which he therefore must
divest himself when he goes into the holy of holies (Lev. xvi. 4).
What now can be the meaning of this fact,--that he who is at the
head of the worship, in this quality alone, and without any political
attributes besides, or any share in the government, is at the same
time at the head of the nation? What but that civil power has been
withdrawn from the nation and is in the hands of foreigners; that
Israel has now merely a spiritual and ecclesiastical existence?
In the eyes of the Priestly Code Israel in point of fact is not
a people, but a church; worldly affairs are far removed from it
and are never touched by its laws; its life is spent in religious
services. Here we are face to face with the church of the second
temple, the Jewish hierocracy, in a form possible only under
foreign domination. It is customary indeed to designate in the Law
by the ideal, or in other words blind, name of theocracy that
which in historical reality is usually called hierarchy; but
to imagine that with the two names one has gained a real
distinction is merely to deceive oneself. But, this self-deception
accomplished, it is easy further to carry back the hierocratic
churchly constitution to the time of Moses, because it excludes
the kingship, and then either to assert that it was kept secret
throughout the entire period of the judges and the monarchy,
or to use the fiction as a lever by which to dislocate the whole
of the traditional history.
To any one who knows anything about history it is not necessary
to prove that the so-called Mosaic theocracy, which nowhere suits
the circumstances of the earlier periods, and of which the prophets,
even in their most ideal delineations of the Israelite state as it
ought to be, have not the faintest shadow of an idea, is, so to
speak, a perfect fit for post-exilian Judaism, and had its
actuality only there. Foreign rulers had then relieved the Jews
of all concern about secular affairs; they had it in their
power, and were indeed compelled to give themselves wholly up to
sacred things, in which they were left completely unhampered.
Thus the temple became the sole centre of life, and the prince of
the temple the head of the spiritual commonwealth, to which also
the control of political affairs, so far as these were still left
to the nation, naturally fell there being no other head! /1/
***********************************************
1. Very interesting and instructive is Ewald's proof of the way in
which Zech. vi. 9-15 has been tampered with, so as to eliminate
Zerubbabel and leave the high priest alone. Just so in dealing
with Caliphs and Sultans, the Patriarchs were and are the natural
heads of the Greek and Oriental Christians even in secular matters.
***********************************************
The Chronicler gave a corresponding number of high priests to the
twice twelve generations of forty years each which were usually
assumed to have elapsed between the exodus and the building of
Solomon's temple, and again between that and the close of the
captivity; the official terms of office of these high priests, of
whom history knows nothing, have taken the place of the reigns of
judges and kings, according to which reckoning was previously
made (1Chronicles v. 29, seq.). One sees clearly from Sirach l.,
and from more than one statement of Josephus (e.g., Ant., xviii.
4, 3, xx. 1, 11), how in the decorations of Aaron (where, however,
the Urim and Thummim were wanting; Nehemiah vii. 65) people
reverenced a transcendent majesty which had been left to the people
of God as in some sense a compensation for the earthly dignity
which had been lost. Under the rule of the Greeks the high priest
became ethnarch and president of the synedrium; only through the
pontificate was it possible for the Hasmonaeans to attain to power,
but when they conjoined it with full-blown secular sovereignty,
they created a dilemma to the consequences of which they succumbed.
CHAPTER V. THE ENDOWMENT OF THE CLERGY.
The power and independence of the clergy run parallel with its
material endowment, which accordingly passes through the same
course of development. Its successive steps are reflected even in
the language that is employed, in the gradual loss of point
sustained by the phrase "to fill the hand," at all times used to
denote ordination. Originally it cannot have had any other
meaning than that of filling the hand with money or its
equivalent; we have seen that at one time the priest was
appointed by the owner of a sanctuary for a salary, and that,
without being thus dependent upon a particular employer, he could
not then live on the income derived from those who might employ
him sacrificially. But when the Levitical hereditary priesthood
arose in the later kingdom of Judah the hands of the priests were
no longer filled by another who had the right to appoint and to
dismiss, but they themselves at God's command "filled their own
hand," or rather they had done so in the days of Moses once for
all, as is said in Exodus xxxii. 26-29, an insertion
corresponding with the position of Deuteronomy. It is obvious
that such a statement, when carefully looked at, is absurd, but
is to be explained by the desire to protest against outside
interference. Even here the etymological sense is still
sufficiently felt to create an involuntary jar and leads to a
change of the construction; but finally all sense of it is lost,
and the expression becomes quite colourless: "to fill the hand "
means simply "to consecrate." In Ezekiel not only the priest but
also the altar has its "hand filled" (xliii. 26); in the
Priestly Code the abstract _milluim_ ["consecrations"] is chiefly
used, with subject and object left out, as the name of a mere
inaugural ceremony which lasts for several days (Leviticus viii. 33;
Exodus xxix. 34), essentially consists in the bringing of an
offering on the part of the person to be consecrated, and has no
longer even the remotest connection with actual filling of the
hand (2Chronicles xiii. 7; comp. xxix. 31). The verb, therefore,
now means simply the performance of this ceremony, and the subject
is quite indifferent (Leviticus xvi. 32, xxi. 10; Numbers iii. 3);
the installation does not depend upon the person who performs the
rite, but upon the rite itself, upon the unction, investiture,
and other formalities (Exodus xxix. 29).
This variation in the _usus Ioquendi_ is the echo of real changes
in the outuard condition of the clergy, which we must now proceed
to consider more in detail.
V.I.
V.I.1. Of the offerings, it was the custom in the earlier time to
dedicate a portion to the deity but to use the greater part in
sacred feasts, at which a priest, if present, was of course
allowed also in one way or another to participate. But he does
not appear to have had a legal claim to any definite dues of
flesh.
"Eli's sons were worthless persons, and cared not about
Jehovah, or about the priests' right and duty with the people.
When any man offered a sacrifice the servant of the priest came
(that is all we have here to represent the 22,000 Levites) while
the flesh was in seething, with a three-pronged flesh-hook in his
hand, and stuck it into the pan, or kettle, or caldron, or pot;
and all that the flesh-hook brought up the priest took. So they
did in Shiloh unto all the Israelites that came thither. Even
before the fat was burnt, the servant of the priest came and said
to the man that sacrificed: "Give flesh to roast for the priest;
he will not take sodden flesh of thee, but raw. And if the other
said to him: Let the fat first be burnt, and then take according
to thy soul's desire; then he would answer: Nay, but thou shalt
give it now; and if not, I will take it by force" (1Samuel ii. 12-16).
The tribute of raw portions of flesh before the burning
of the fat is here treated as a shameless demand which is fitted to
bring Jehovah's offering into contempt (ver. 17), and which has
the ruin of the sons of Eli as its merited reward. More tolerable
is it, though even that is an abuse, when the priests cause
boiled flesh to be brought them from the pot, though not seeking
out the best for themselves, but leaving the selection to chance;
they ought to wait and see what is given to them, or be contented
with an invitation to the banquet. On the other hand we have it
in Deuteronomy as "the priest's due from the people" (xviii. 3
= 1Samuel ii. 12) that he receives the shoulder and the two
cheeks and the maw of the slaughtered animal; and yet this is a
modest claim compared with what the sons of Aaron have in the
Priestly Code (Leviticus vii. 34),--the right leg and the breast.
The course of the development is plain; the Priestly Code became
law for Judaism. In sacrifice, ITS demands were those which were
regarded; but in order to fulfil all righteousness the precept of
Deuteronomy was also maintained, this being applied--against the
obvious meaning and certainly only as a result of later scrupulosity
of the scribes--not to sacrifices but to ordinary secular slaughterings,
from which also accordingly the priests received a portion, the
cheeks (according to Jerome on Malachi ii. 3), including the tongue,
the precept being thus harmonistically doubled. /1/ At an earlier
********************************************
1. Philo, De praem. sacerd., sec. 3. Josephus, Ant., iii. 9. 2;
iv. 4, 4.
********************************************
date the priests at Jerusalem received money from those who
employed them (Deuteronomy xviii. 8), but for this had the obligation
of maintaining the temple; from this one can discern that the
money was properly speaking paid to the sanctuary, and was only
conditionally delivered to its servitors. When they failed to
observe the condition, King Jehoash took the money also from them
(2Kings xii. 7 seq.).
The meal-offerings are in the Priestly Code a subordinate matter,
and the share that falls to the priests is here trifling compared
with what they receive of the other sacrifices. The meal, of
which only a handful is sprinkled upon the altar, the baked
bread, and the minha altogether are theirs entirely, so also the
sin and trespass offerings so frequently demanded, of which God
receives only the blood and the fat and the offerer nothing at
all (Ezekiel xliv. 29); of the burnt-offering at least the skin
falls to their lot, These perquisites, however, none of them in
their definite form demonstrably old, and some of them
demonstrably the reverse, may be presumed to have had their
analogues in the earlier period, so that they cannot be regarded
absolutely as augmentation of the priestly income. In Josiah's
time the mac,c,oth were among the principal means of support of
the priests (2Kings xxiii. 9); doubtless they came for the
most part from the minha. Instead of sin and trespass offerings,
which are still unknown to Deuteronomy, there were formerly sin
and trespass dues in the form of money payments to the
priests,--payments which cannot, however, have been so regular
(2Kings xii. 17). It is as if money payments were in the eye of
the law too profane; for atonement there must be shedding of blood.
That the skin of the holocaust, which cannot well be consumed on
the altar, should fall to the priest is so natural an arrangement,
that one will hardly be disposed to regard it as new, although
Ezekiel is silent about a due which was not quite worthless
(xliv. 28-31).
So far then as departures from earlier custom can be shown in the
sacrificial dues enjoined by the Priestly Code, they must not
indeed be treated as purely local differences, but neither are
they to be regarded as on the whole showing a serious raising of
the tariff. But in the Code the sacrificial dues are only a
subordinate part of the income of the priests. In Deuteronomy the
priests are entirely thrown upon the sacrifices; they live upon
them (xviii. 1) and upon invitations to the sacred banquets (xii.
I2, 18 seq.); if they are not exercising the priestly function
they must starve (1Samuel ii. 36). On the other hand, the
Aaronidae of the Priestly Code do not need to sacrifice at all,
and yet have means of support, for their chief revenue consists
of the rich dues which must be paid them from the products of
the soil.
V.I.2. The dues falling to the priests according to the law were all
originally offerings--the regular offerings which had to be brought
on the festivals; and these all originally were for sacred
banquets, of which the priests received nothing more than the
share which was generally customary. This is true in the first
instance of the male firstlings of cattle. As we have seen in the
chapter on the sacred feasts, these are sacrifices and sacrificial
meals, alike in the Jehovistic legislation and in the Jehovistic
narrative of the exodus and of Abel, as were all the offerings
brought by private individuals in the olden time. When in Exodus
xxii. 29 it is said that they must be given to JEHOVAH, this does
not mean that they must be given to THE PRIESTS; no such thing
is anywhere said in thc Book of the Covenant. Matters still stand
on essentially the same footing in Deuteronomy also: "THOU
SHALT SANCTIFY THEM UNTO JEHOVAH; thou shalt not plough with the
firstling of the bullock, nor shear the firstling of thy sheep;
THOU SHALT EAT IT BEFORE JEHOVAH year by year in the place which
He shall choose; and if there be any blemish therein, thou shalt
not OFFER IT TO JEHOVAH THY GOD" (Deuteronomy xv. 19, 20). To
sanctify to Jehovah, to eat before Jehovah, to offer to Jehovah,
are here three equivalent ideas. If now, in Numbers xviii. 15
seq., every first birth is assigned without circumlocution to the
priest, and a special paschal offering is appointed in addition,
this can only be understood as the last phase in the development,
partly because the idea of dues altogether is secondary to that
of offerings, and partly because the immense augmentation in the
income of the priests points to an increase of the hierocratic
power. Ezekiel does not yet reckon the firstlings among the
revenues of the clergy (xliv. 28-3I); the praxis of Judaism, on
the other hand, since Nehemiah x. 37, is regulated, as usual, in
accordance with the norm of the Priestly Code.
The tithe also is originally given to God, and treated just as the
other offerings are; that is to say, it is not appropriated by
the priests, but eaten by those who bring it in sacred banquets.
It does not occur in the Jehovistic legislation, but Jacob
dedicates it (Genesis xxviii. 22) to the God of Bethel, a place
where, although the whole story is a projection out of a later
time, it would hardly be in harmony with the conceptions of the
narrator to think of the presence of priests. The prophet Amos,
who probably represents much the same stage of the cultus as the
Jehovist does, says: "Come to Bethel to transgress, to Gilgal to
sin still more; and bring every morning your sacrifices, every
three days your tithes, and offer with bread pieces of flesh to the
flames, and proclaim free offerings aloud, for so ye like, ye
children of Israel" (Amos iv. 4 seq.). He ironically recommends
them to persevere in the efforts they have hitherto made in
honour of God, and to double them; to offer daily, instead of, as
was usual (1Samuel i.), yearly at the chief festival; to pay
tithes every three days, instead of, as was the custom, every
three years. It is clear that the tithe here holds rank with Zebah,
Toda, and Nedaba; it is a sacrifice of joy, and a splendid
element of the public cultus, no mere due to the priests. Now,
in this point also Deuteronomy has left the old custom, on the
whole, unchanged. According to xiv. 22 seq. the tithe of the
produce of the soil, or its equivalent in money, must be brought
year by year to the sanctuary, and there consumed before Jehovah
that is, as a sacrificial meal; only every third year it is not
to be offered in Jerusalem, but is to be given as alms to the
people of the locality who have no land, to which category the
Levites in particular belong. This last application is an
innovation, connected on the one hand with the abolition of the
sanctuaries, and on the other with the tendency of the
Deuteronomist to utilise festal mirth for humane ends. /1/
*********************************************
1. Connection is, however, possible with some older custom, such as
must certainly be assumed for Amos iv. 4. Comp. Deuteronomy xxvi.
12, "the year of tithing."
**********************************************
But this is a mere trifle compared with what we find in the Priestly
Code, where the whole tithe has become a mere due to be collected
by the Levites (Nehemiah x. 38 [37]) on behalf of the clergy,
whose endowment thereby is again very largely increased. Ezekiel
is silent on this point also (xliv. 18-31), but as the tithe is
demanded in Numbers (xviii. 21 seq.), so was it paid from the days
of Nehemiah (x. 38 [37] seq.) by the church of the second temple.
Later there was added over and above, so as to meet the divergent
requirement of Deuteronomy, the so-called second tithe, which usually
was consumed at Jerusalem, but in every third year was given to the
poor (so Deuteronomy xxvi. 12, LXX), and in the end the tithe for
the poor was paid separately over and above the first and second
(Tobit i. 7, 8; Jos., Ant., iv. 8, 22).
It is absolutely astounding that the tithe which in its proper
nature should apply only to products of definite measure, such
as corn and wine and oil (Deuteronomy xiv. 23), comes to be extended
in the Priestly Code to cattle also, so that besides the male
firstlings every tenth head of cattle and of sheep must also be
paid to the priests. This demand, however, is not yet met with in
Numbers xviii., nor even in Nehemiah x. 38, 39, but first occurs as a
novel in Lev. xxvii. 32 (1Samuel viii. 17). Whether it ever
came into the actual practice of Judaism seems doubtful; in
2Chronicles xxxi. 6 the tithe of cattle is indeed mentioned,
but on the other hand the firstlings are not; in the pre-rabbinical
literature no traces of it are discoverable,--especially not in
Philo, who knows only of the ordinary tithes due to the Levites,
and not of the tithes of cattle due to the priests (De praem.
sacerd. 6).
With the tithe of the fruit of the soil the first fruits are at
bottom identical; the latter were reduced to definite measure
later and through the influence of the former. This is no doubt
the reason why in the Jehovistic legislation tithe and first
fruits are not both demanded, but only a gift of the first and
best of corn, wine, and oil, left to the free discretion of the
offerer, which is conjoined with the firstling of cattle and sheep
(Exodus xxii. 28 [29]. xxiii. 19, xxxiv. 26). In a precisely
similar way the TITHE of the field stands conjoined with the
firstlings of cattle in Deuteronomy (xiv. 22, 23, xv. 19 seq.).
But also the _reshith_, usually translated first-fruits, occurs in
Deuteronomy,--as a payment of corn, wine, oil, and wool to the
priests (xviii. 4); a small portion, a basketful, thereof is
brought before the altar and dedicated with a significant liturgy
(xxvi. 1 seq.). It appears that it is taken from the tithe, as
might be inferred from xxvi. 12 seq. taken as the continuation
of vers. 1-11; in one passage, xxvi. 2, the more general
_usus loquendi_ reappears, according to which the _reshith_ means
the entire consecrated fruit, which as a whole is consumed by the
offerers before Jehovah, and of which the priests receive only a
portion. But in the Priestly Code not only is the entire tithe
demanded as a due of the clergy, the _reshith_ also is demanded in
addition (Numbers xviii. 12), and it is further multiplied,
inasmuch as it is demanded from the kneading-trough as well as
from the threshing-floor: in every leavening the _halla_ belongs
to Jehovah (xv. 20). Nor is this all; to the _reshith_ (xviii. 12)
are added the _bikkurim_ also (xviii. 13), as something
distinct. The distinction does not occur elsewhere (Exodus xxxiv.
26); prepared fruits alone are invariably spoken of, the yield
of the threshing-floor and the wine-press, of which first
produce--"the fulness and the overflow "--was to be consecrated.
The FAT of oil, wine, and corn is the main thing in Numbers xviii.
also, and is called _reshith_ (ver 12) or _terumah_ (ver. 27); but
the _bikkurim_ (ver. 13) seem to be a separate thing, and, if
this be really the case, must mean those raw fruits which have
ripened earliest. Judaism, here once more moulding itself
essentially in accordance with the tenor of the Priestly Code,
actually drew this distinction; from the publication of the Law
through Ezra the community pledged itself to bring up yearly the
_bikkurim_ to the house of Jehovah, and to deliver the _reshith_ into
the temple cells (Nehemiah x. 36 [35]). The former was a religious
solemnity, associated with processions, and the use of the ritual
in Deuteronomy xxvi.; the latter was rather a simple tax paid from
natural products,--a distinction which perhaps is connected with
the different expressions _they shall bring_ (Numbers xviii. 13) and
_they shall give_ (xviii. 12). The LXX keeps )APARXH and
PRWTOGENNHMATA strictly apart, as also do Philo (De praem. sacerd.
1, 2) and Josephus (Ant., iv. 4, 8, 22).
V.I.3. The amount which at last is required to be given is enormous.
What originally were alternatives are thrown together, what
originally was left free and undetermined becomes precisely
measured and prescribed. The priests receive all the sin and trespass
offerings, the greater share of the vegetable offerings, the hides
of the burnt offerings, the shoulder and breast of meat offerings.
Over and above are the firstlings, to which are added the tithes
and first-fruits in a duplicate form, in short, all _kodashim_,
which originally were demanded merely as ordinary meat offerings
(Deuteronomy xii. 26 = ver. 6, 7, and so on), and were
consumed at holy places and by consecrated guests indeed, but not
by the priest. And, notwithstanding all this, the clergy are not
even asked (as in Ezekiel is the prince, who there receives the
dues, xlv. 13 seq.) to defray the cost of public worship; for
this there is a poll-tax, which is not indeed enjoined in the body
of the Priestly Code, but which from the time of Nehemiah x. 33
[32] was paid at the rate of a third of a shekel, till a novel of
the law (Exodus xxx. 15) raised it to half a shekel.
V.II.
V.II.1. To the endowment of the clergy in the Priestly Code belong
finally the forty-eight cities assigned by Joshua in accordance
with the appointment of Moses (Numbers xxxv.; Josh. xxi.). The
tribes gave them up freely; the smaller giving few and the larger
more (Numbers xxxv. 8). The Aaronidae and the three families of
the Levites cast lots about them in four divisions; the sons of
Aaron get thirteen cities in Judah, the Levites ten in
Ephraim-Manasseh, thirteen in Galilee, and twelve in the territory
eastward of Jordan. It is not merely the right to inhabit, but,
in spite of all apologetic rationalism, the right of absolute
possession that they receive (Josh. xxi. 12), inclusive of a portion
of land two thousand ells square (square in the strictly literal
sense; Numbers xxxv. 5), which serves as public common.
The physical impracticability of such an arrangement has been
conclusively shown, after Gramberg, by Graf (Merx, Archiv, i.
p. 83). The 4 x 12 or the substituted 13+10+13+12 cities,
of which in spite of Numbers xxxv. 8 for the most part four belong
to each of the twelve tribes, are already sufficient to suggest a
suspicion of artificial construction; but the regulation that a
rectangular territory of two thousand ells square should be
measured off as pasture for the Levites around each city (which
at the same time is itself regarded only as a point; Numbers xxxv.
4) might, to speak with Graf, be very well carried out perhaps in
a South Russian steppe or in newly founded townships in the
western States of America, but not in a mountainous country like
Palestine, where territory that can be thus geometrically
portioned off does not exist, and where it is by no means left to
arbitrary legal enactments to determine what pieces of ground are
adapted for pasturage and what for tillage and gardening; there,
too, the cities were already in existence, the land was already
under cultivation, as the Israelites slowly conquered it in the
course of centuries. Besides, from the time of Joshua there is
not a historical trace of the existence of the Levitical cities.
Quite a number of them were in the days of the judges and down
to the early monarchy still in the hands of the Canaanites,--
Gibeon, Shechem, Gezer, Taanach; some perhaps may even have so
continued permanently. Those on the other hand which passed
into the possession of the Israelites at no time belonged
to the Levites. Shechem, Hebron, Ramoth, were the capital cities
of Ephraim, Judah, and Gilead; and Gibeon, Gezer, Heshbon were in
like manner important but by no means ecclesiastical towns. In
the Deuteronomic period the Levites were scattered throughout
Judah in such a manner that each locality had its own Levites or
Levite; nowhere did they live separated from the rest of the
world in compact masses together, for they made their living by
sacrificing for others, and without a community they could not
exercise their calling. Some indeed possessed land and heritage;
such were at an earlier period the Silonic family at
Gibeath-Phineas, Amaziah at Bethel, and Abiathar at Anathoth, and
at a later period Jeremiah, also at Anathoth. But Anathoth (for
example) was not on that account a priestly city in the sense of
Joshua xxi.; Jeremiah had his holding there as a citizen and not
as a priest, and he shared not with the priests but with the
people (xxxvii. 12). As a tribe Levi was distinguished from the
other tribes precisely by holding no land, and its members
joined themselves to the settled citizens and peasants, for the
most part as dependent inmates (Deuteronomy x. 9, xviii. 1).
Even after the exile, indeed, matters were not different in this
respect. "Ab excidio templi prioris sublatum est Levitis jus
suburbiorum," says R. Nachman (B. Sotah, 48b), and he is
borne out by the silence of Nehemiah x. The execution of the law
was probably postponed to the days of the Messiah; it was not in
truth within the power of man, and cannot be seriously demanded
in the Priestiy Code itself, which contemplates a purely ideal
Israel, with ideal boundaries, and leaves the sober reality so
far out of sight that on archaeological grounds it never once so
much as mentions Jerusalem, the historical capital of the priests.
The circumstance that these towns lay _in partibus infiidelium_
seems to make them unavailable as a means of fixing the antiquity
of the Priestly Code. It is possible with Bleek to explain the
transcendence of history as Mosaicity; such a view is not to be
argued against. But it is also possible with Noldeke to insist
that an invention so bold cannot possibly be imputed to the
spirit of the exilic and post-exilic time, which in everything
is only anxiously concerned to cleave to what is old and to
restore it; and such a contention deserves and admits of refutation.
It is not the case that the Jews had any profound respect for their
ancient history; rather they condemned the whole earlier
development, and allowed only the Mosaic time along with its
Davidic reflex to stand; in other words, not history but the
ideal. The theocratic ideal was from the exile onwards the centre
of all thought and effort, and it annihilated the sense for
objective truth, all regard and interest for the actual facts as
they had been handed down. It is well known that there never
have been more audacious history-makers than the Rabbins. But
Chronicles affords evidence sufficient that this evil propensity
goes back to a very early time, its root the dominating
influence of the Law, being the root of Judaism itself. Judaism
is just the right soil for such an artificial growth as the
forty-eight priestly and Levitical cities. It would hardly have
occurred to an author living in the monarchical period, when the
continuity of the older history was still unbroken, to look so
completely away from all the conditions of the then existing
reality; had he done so, he would have produced upon his
contemporaries the impression merely that he had scarcely all his
wits about him. But after the exile had annihilated the ancient
Israel, and violently and completely broken the old connection
with the ancient conditions, there was nothing to hinder from
planting and partitioning the _tabula rasa_ in thought at pleasure,
just as geographers are wont to do with their map as long as the
countries are unknown.
But, of course, no fancy is pure fancy; every imagination has
underlying it some elements of reality by which it can be laid
hold of, even should these only be certain prevailing notions of
a particular period. It is clear, if a proper territory is
assigned to the clergy, that the notion of the clerical tribe which
already had begun to strike root in Deuteronomy has here grown
and gathered strength to such a degree that even the last and
differentiating distinction is abolished which separates the
actual tribes from the Levites, viz. communal independence and
the degree of concentration which expresses itself in separate
settlements. For when we read, notwithstanding, in the Priestly
Code that Aaron and Levi are to have no lot nor inheritance in
Israel (Numbers xviii. 20, 23), this is merely a form of speech
taken over from Deuteronomy and at the same time an involuntary
concession to fact; what would the forty-eight cities have been,
had they actually existed, if not a lot, a territorial possession,
and that too a comparatively large one? The general basis which
serves as starting-point for the historical fiction being thus far
recognisable, we are able also to gain a closer view of its
concrete material. The priestly and Levitical cities stand in
close connection with the so-called cities of refuge. These are
also appointed in Deuteronomy (xix.), although not enumerated by
name (for Deuteronomy iv. 41-43 cannot be regarded as genuine).
Originally the altars were asylums (Exodus xxi. 14; 1Kings ii.
28), some in a higher degree than others (Exodus xxi. 13). In
order not to abolish the asylums also along with the altars, the
Deuteronomic legislator desired that certain holy places should
continue as places of refuge, primarily three for Judah, to which,
when the territory of the kingdom extended, three others were to
be afterwards added. The Priestly Code adopts the arrangement,
and specifies three definite cities on this side and three on the
other side of Jordan (Numbers xxxv.; Joshua xx.), four of which
are demonstrably famous old seats of worship,--all the three western
ones, and Ramoth, that is, Mizpah, of the eastern ones (Genesis
xxxi.; Judges xi. 11). But as all these asylums are at the same
time priestly and Levitical cities, it is an obvious conjecture
that these also in like manner arose out of old sanctuaries. We
need not suppose that there is more in this than an echo of the
general recollection that there were once in Israel many holy
places and residences of priesthoods; it is by no means
necessary to assert that each of the towns enumerated in Joshua
xxi. had actually been an ancient sanctuary. In many cases,
however, this also admits of being shown, /1/ although some of the
*********************************************
1. In the cases of Hebron, Gibeon, Shechem, Ramoth, Mahanaim and
Tabor (Host v. 1) by historical data; in those of Bethshemesh,
Ashtaroth, Kadesh,, perhaps also Rimmon, by the names. Not even
here can one venture to credit the Priestly Code with consistent
fidelity to history. As for Hosea v. 1, 2, the original
meaning seems to be: "A snare have ye become for Mizpah, and an
outspread net upon Tabor, and the pit-fall of Shittim (#XT
H#+YM) have they made deep." Shittim as a camping-place under
Moses and Joshua must certainly have been a sanctuary, just like
Kadesh, Gilgal, and Shiloh; the prophet names these seats at
which in his opinion the worship was especially seductive and
soul-destroying; his reproach is levelled at the priests
most famous (or according to the later view, infamous) high
places, such as Bethel, Dan, Gilgal, and Beersheba are omitted,
probably of set purpose.
The immediate starting-point, however, for this territorial
donation to the Levites is perhaps to be sought in Ezekiel,
in the picture of the future Israel which he draws at the close
of his book. He concerns himself there in a thorough-going
manner about the demarcation of the national and tribal
boundaries, and in doing so sets quite freely to work, taking,
so to speak, the yard measure in his hand. Leaving the land
eastward of Jordan wholly to the Saracens, he divides the
western portion into thirteen parallel transverse sections;
in the middle of the thirteenth (the rest of which is assigned
to the prince), lying between Judah and Benjamin, the twelve
tribes give up a square with a base line of 25,000 ells as a
sacred offering to Jehovah. This square is divided into three
parallelograms, 25,000 ells long, running east and west;
the southernmost of these, 5000 ells broad, includes the capital
with its territory; the middle one, 10,000 ells broad, contains
the temple and the priestly territory; the northernmost, also
10,000 ells broad, has the inheritance and the cities of the Levites. /1/
**********************************************
1. For (S#RYM L#KT (xlv. 5), read, with the LXX, #(RYM L#BT
"to dwell within the gates." Compare a similar transposition of
letters in xiii. 3, LXX. The expression "gates" for "cities"
has its origin in Deuteronomy.
*********************************************
Thus we have here also a surrender of land to the clergy on the
part of the tribes; the comparison with Josh. xxi. is not to be
put aside,--all the less, because nowhere else in the Old Testament
is anything similar met with. Now Ezekiel is quite transparent,
and requires no interpreter but himself. In order that the temple
may be protected in its sanctity in the best possible manner,
it is placed in the centre of the priestly territory, which in its
turn is covered by the city on the south, and by the Levites on the
north. At the same time the _personnel_ connected with the function
of worship is to dwell as much as possible apart on its own soil
and territory, which _shall serve them for separate houses to
sanctify them_, as is expressly remarked for the priests (xiv. 4),
and in an inferior degree holds good also, of course, for the Levites
beside them. Here everything starts from, and has its explanation in,
the temple. Its original is unmistakably the temple of Solomon;
its site is beside the capital, in the heart of the sacred centre
of the land between Judah and Benjamin; there the sons of Zadok
have their abode, and beside them are the Levites whom Josiah had
brought up from all the country to Jerusalem. Obviously the
motives are not here far to seek. In the Priestly Code, on the
other hand, which was not in a position to shape the future freely
out of the present, but was compelled to accept archaeological
restrictions, the motives are historically concealed and almost
paralysed. The result has remained, namely, the holding of
separate territory by the clergy, but the cause or the
purpose of it can no longer be recognised on account of the
sanctuary being now an abstract idea. Jerusalem and the temple,
which, properly speaking, occasioned the whole arrangement, are
buried in silence with a diligence which is in the highest degree
surprising; and on the other hand, in remembrance of the
priesthoods scattered everywhere among the high places of Israel
in earlier days, forty-eight fresh Levitical cities are created,
from which, however, their proper focus, a temple to wit, is
withheld only in the circumstance that precisely the thirteen
cities of Judah and Benjamin happen to fall to the lot of the sons
of Aaron, does the influence of Jerusalem unconsciously betray
itself.
V.II.2. Apart from this historical fiction, the other claims that
are made for the endowment of the clergy are, however exorbitant,
nevertheless practicable and seriously meant. So far as the
circumstances of their origin are concerned, two possibilities
present themselves. Either the priests demanded what they could
hope to obtain, in which case they were actually supreme over the
nation, or they set up claims which at the time were neither
justified nor even possible; in which case they were not indeed
quite sober, yet at the same time so sane prophetically, that
centuries afterwards the revenues they dreamed of became in
actuality theirs. Is it to be supposed that it was (say) Moses,
who encouraged his people as they were struggling for bare life
in the wilderness to concern themselves about a superabundantly
rich endowment of their clergy? Or is it believed that it was
in the period of the judges, when the individual tribes and
families of Israel, after having forced their way among the
Canaanites, had a hard fight to maintain their position, get
somehow settled in their new dwelling-places and surroundings,
that the thought first arose of exacting such taxes from a people
that was only beginning to grow into a national unity, for an end
that was altogether remote from its interest? What power could
then have been able in those days, when every man did what was
right in his own eyes, to compel the individual to pay? But
even when actually, under the pressure of circumstances, a
political organisation had arisen which embraced all the tribes,
it could hardly have occurred to the priests to utilise the
secular arm as a means for giving to themselves a place of
sovereignty; and still less could they have succeeded WITHOUT
the king on whom they were so completely dependent. In short,
the claims they make in the Law would in the pre-exilic period
have been regarded as utopian in the strict sense of that word;
they allow of explanation only by the circumstances which from
the beginning of the Chaldaean rule, and still more that of the
Persians, lent themselves to the formation of a hierocracy,
to which, as to the truly national and moreover divine authority,
the people gave voluntary obedience, and to which the Persians
also conceded rights they could not have granted to the family
of David. At the very beginning of the exile, Ezekiel begins
to augment the revenues of the priests (xliv. 28-30), yet he
still confines himself on the whole to the lines of Deuteronomy,
and makes no mention of tithes and firstlings. Of the demands
of the Priestly Code in their full extent we hear historically
in Nehemiah x. for the first time; there it is stated
that they were carried through by men who had the authority of
Artaxerxes behind them. This was the most difficult and at the
same time the most important part of the work Ezra and Nehemiah
had to do in introducing the Pentateuch as the law of the Jewish
Church; and that is the reason why it is so specially and
minutely spoken of. Here plainly lies the material basis of the
hierocracy from which the royal throne was ultimately reached.
For all these dues, apart from sacrificial perquisites, flowed into
a common coffer, and benefited those who had the control of this,
viz., the priestly aristocracy of Jerusalem, whom it helped to
rise to a truly princely position. The ordinary priests,
and especially the Levites, did not gain by all this wealth.
The latter indeed ought, according to law, to have had the tithes,
and to have handed over the tithes of these again to the sons
of Aaron, but as the general tendency of the time was to depress
the Levites, this legal revenue was also gradually withdrawn
from them and appropriated by the priests. Afterwards the chief
priests claimed the tithes for themselves alone, while their
inferior brethren had to suffer severe privation and even
hunger itself (Josephus, Ant., xx. 8, 8; 9, 2).
Upon the difference just stated between the later practice and
the Law, one argument more has recently been founded against
assigning the latter to the Babylonio-Persian period. "Another
testimony borne by tradition completely excludes the idea of
the Elohistic torah (i.e., the Priestly Code) having been
composed by Ezra. As is well known, it is the Elohistic torah
that carefully regulates the mutual relations of priests and
Levites, while Deuteronomy groups the two together without
bringing forward the distinction. It is the former that assigns
the tithes to the Levites, while requiring these in their turn to
hand over the tithe of their tithes as a due to the priests. Such
was also the practice (Nehemiah x. 38 seq.) soon after the exile
[i.e., a hundred years later; Nehemiah vii. 5]. But subsequently
the payment of the tithes to the Levites fell entirely into
disuse; these were rendered immediately and exclusively to the
priests, so that Jose ben Hanina actually confesses: "We do
not pay the tithes according to the command of God" (Sota, 47b).
But everywhere the Talmud refers this practice back to Ezra. Ezra
it was who punished the Levites by withdrawal of the tithes, and
that because they had not come out from Babylon (Jebam. 386b;
Chullin 11b). The point to be noted is that Ezra, according to
the testimony of tradition, superseded a precept of the Elohistic
torah, supporting himself in this perhaps by reference to the
Deuteronomic torah." So Delitzsch in the Zeitschr. fuer luth.
Theol., 1877, p. 448 seq. That Ezra is not the author of the
Priestly Code may readily be granted--only not on such an
argument as this. If the genuine historical tradition expressly
names Ezra as the man who introduced the Levites' tithe just as
prescribed by law (Nehemiah x. 38 seq.), what conscientious man can
attach any weight to the opposite assertion of the Talmud ?
But, even assuming that the divergence of practice from the legal
statute actually does go back to the time of Ezra, what would
follow from that against the post-exilic origin of the Priestly
Code? For this is what the question comes to, not to Ezra's
authorship, which is made the main point by a mere piece of
transparent controversial tactics. The demands of the Priestly
Code, which demonstrably were neither laid down, nor in any sense
acted on before the exile, attained the force of law one hundred
years after the return from Babylon (Nehemiah x.); the whole
taxation system of Judaism ever afterwards rested upon it;- -
shall this be held to have no meaning as against the trifling
circumstance that the tithe also was indeed paid to the clergy,
in full accordance with the Priestly Code, and inconsistently with
ancient custom, but paid to the higher, and not to the lower order?
In point of fact any other difference whatever between Jewish
practice and the Law might better have been adduced against the
thesis of Graf,--for example, the absence of Urim and Thummim (Nehemiah
vii. 65), or of the forty-eight Levitical cities, the church of
the returned exiles instead of that of the twelve tribes of
Israel, the second temple instead of the tabernacle, Ezra instead
of Moses, the sons of Zadok instead of the sons of Aaron,
the absence of the other marks of Mosaicity. For the position
of the Levites is the Achilles heel of the Priestly Code.
If the Levites at a later date were still further lowered beneath
the priests, and put into a worse position in favour of these,
this nevertheless presupposes the distinction between the two;
let it first then be shown that the distinction is known to
the genuine Old Testament, and that, in particular, it is
introduced by Ezekiel not as a new thing, but as of immemorial
antiquity. Or is the primary fact that the separation between
priests and Levites was set up only in the Priestly Code and
in Judaism, and that its genesis can be traced with confidence
from the time of Josiah downwards, a fact of less importance
than the secondary one that the distinction extended itself
somewhat further still in the subsequent development of
Judaism ?
B. HISTORY OF TRADITION.
_________________
PLEON (HMISU PANTOS-- Hesiod
CHAPTER VI. CHRONICLES
Under the influence of the spirit of each successive age,
traditions originally derived from one source were very
variously apprehended and shaped; one way in the ninth and
eighth centuries, another way in the seventh and sixth, and yet
another in the fifth and fourth. Now, the strata of the tradition
show the same arrangement as do those of the legislation. And
here it makes no difference whether the tradition be legendary or
historical, whether it relates to pre-historic or to historic
times; the change in the prevailing ideas shows itself equally in
either case. To show the truth of this in the case of the
Hexateuch is of course our primary object, but we make our
commencement rather with the properly historical books. For on
various grounds we are here able with greater certainty to
assert: Such was the aspect of history at this period and such
at that; such were the influences that had the ascendancy at
one time, and such those which prevailed at another.
We begin the inquiry where the matter is clearest--namely, with
the Book of Chronicles. Chronicles, which properly speaking forms
but a single book along with Ezra and Nehemiah, is a second
history running parallel with the Books of Samuel and Kings,
and we are here in the favourable position of starting with the
objects of comparison distinctly defined, instead of having as
usual to begin by a critical separation of sources of various age
combined in one document. And, what is more, we can also date the
rival histories with tolerable certainty. The Books of Samuel and
of Kings were edited in the Babylonian exile; Chronicles, on the
other hand, was composed fully three hundred years later, after
the downfall of the Persian empire, out of the very midst of fully
developed Judaism. We shall now proceed to show that the mere
difference of date fully accounts for the varying ways in which
the two histories represent the same facts and events, and the
difference of spirit arises from the influence of the Priestly
Code which came into existence in the interval. De Wette's "Critical
Essay on the Credibility of the Books of Chronicles" (Beitraege,
i.; 1806), is throughout taken as the basis of the discussion:
that essay has not been improved on by Graf (Gesch. Bucher d.
A. T. p. 114 seq.), for here the difficulty, better grappled
with by the former, is not to collect the details of evidence,
but so to shape the superabundant material as to convey a right
total impression.
VI.I.
VI.I.1. After Jehovah had slain Saul (so begins the narrative of
Chronicles), He turned the kingdom unto David the son of Jesse.
All Israel gathered themselves unto David to Hebron and anointed
him king over Israel, according to the word of Jehovah by Samuel
(I Chronicles x. 1.-xi. 3). How simply and smoothly and wholly
without human intervention according to this version did the thing
come to pass! Quite otherwise is it in the narrative of the Book
of Samuel. This also indeed has the statement of Chronicles word
for word, but it has something over and above which gives a quite
different aspect to the matter. Here David, on the lowest step to
the throne, is the guerilla leader in the wilderness of Judah who
finally is compelled by Saul's persecutions to pass over to
Philistine territory, there under the protection of the enemies
of his nation, carrying on his freebooter life. After the battle of
Gilboa he avails himself of the dissolution of the kingdom to set
up a separate principality in the south as a vassal of the
Philistines; he is not chosen, but comes with a following six
hundred strong, and offers himself to the elders of Judah,
whom he has already at an earlier period laid under obligations
to him by various favours and gifts. In the meantime Saul's cousin
Abner takes over what of the kingdom there is, not for himself
but for the legitimate heir Ishbaal; from Gilead, whither the
government had been transferred after the great catastrophe,
he gradually reconquers the territory west of Jordan, and is
scheming how to recover also the lost Judah. Thus it comes
to protracted struggles between Abner and David, in which fortune
is most on the side of the latter; yet he does not leave the
defensive or gain the sovereignty over Israel. That falls
into his hands rather by treachery. Abner himself, indignant
at the ingratitude of his royal nephew, offers the crown to
his rival, and enters into negotiations with him about it;
but as he immediately afterwards falls a victim to blood revenge,
nothing comes of the matter until Ishbaal is privily murdered
in his sleep by two of his captains; then at last the elders
of Israel come to Hebron, and David becomes king in succession
to Saul. What a length of time these affairs demand, how natural
is their development, how many human elements mingle in their
course,--cunning, and treachery, and battle, and murder!
Chronicles indeed knows them all well enough, as is clear from
incidental expressions in chaps. xi. and xii., but they are
passed over in silence. Immediately after his predecessor's death
the son of Jesse is freely chosen by all Israel to be king,
according to the word of Jehovah by Samuel. The sequence of x.
13, 14, xi. 1 does not admit of being understood in any other
way, nor is it in point of fact otherwise understood, for it has
actually been successful, at least to this extent, that the
kingship of Ishbaal has virtually dropped out of traditional Bible
history; after Saul came David is what is said. We have before
us a deliberate and in its motives a very transparent mutilation
of the original narrative as preserved for us in the Book of
Samuel.
As all Israel has made David the successor of Saul, and all Israel
gone out with him to the conquest of Jerusalem (xi. 4),--in 2Samuel
v. 6 we hear only of David's following,--so now immediately
afterwards, the noblest representatives of all the tribes of
Israel, who even before he had attained the throne were in
sympathy and indeed already on his side, are enumerated by name
and numbers in three lists (xi. 10-xii. 40), which are introduced
between what is said in 2Samuel v. 1-1110 and in 2Samuel v. 11
seq. The first (xi. 10-47: "these are the mighty men who took
part with him with all Israel to make him king") is the list of
2Samuel xxiii., which the Chronicler, as he betrays in chaps. xx.,
xxi., was acquainted with as it stood in that place, and here
gives much too early, for it is for the most part warriors of
David's later campaigns who are enumerated. /1/ The second list (xii.
**************************************
1. The division into a group of three and another of thirty heroes,
obscured in 2Samuel xxiii. by corruption of the text (Text der
BB. Sam. p. 213-216), has not been understood by the
Chronicler, and thus been made quite unrecognisable. In this way
he has been able to bring in at the end (xi. 42-47) a string of
additional names exceeding the number of thirty. In ver. 42 his
style unmistakably betrays itself, wherever it may be that he
met with the elements.
****************************************
1-22: "these are they that came to David to Ziklag, while he yet
kept himself close because of Saul") is not taken from the Book of
Samuel, but one also observes this difference: along with old
and genuine there are extremely common names, and hardly one
that occurs here only; the notes of ancestry carefully given
in chap. xi. are almost always wanting; and instead of performing
before our eyes such deeds as the rescue of a field of barley
from the enemy, the purchase of a draught of water with blood,
the slaying of a lion in a pit, the heroes receive all sorts
of _epitheta ornantia_ (xii. 1-3) and titles of honour (xii. 14,
20), and ordinarily talk a highly spiritual language (xii. 17, 18).
And as for the historical situation, how impossible that a great
Israelite army should have been gathered around David as the
feudatory of the Philistines in Ziklag (xii. 2 2), with a crowd
of captains of hundreds and thousands! Plainly the banished
fugitive is according to this representation the splendid king
and illustrious ancestor of the established dynasty; hence also
the naive remark of ver. 29. No better is it with the third
list (xii. 23-40: "these are the numbers of the bands, ready
armed for the war, who came to David to Hebron"). Observe the
regular enumeration of the twelve tribes, which nowhere occurs
in the older historical books, and is quite artificial; then
the vast numbers, which are not matters of indifference here,
but the principal thing and make up the entire contents; finally,
the 4600 Levites and 3700 priests, who also take their place in
the martial train, and constitute the proper guard of the king;
to Chronicles the distinction between secular and spiritual soldiers
is not altogether clear. There are but a few details of a special
kind; the remark in xii. 32 is perhaps connected with 2Samuel
xx. 18; Jehoiada the prince of the house of Aaron, i.e., the high
priest, alongside of the historically certain series,--Eli, Phinehas,
Ahitub, Ahiah (Ahimelech ), Abiathar,--an utterly impossible
person, is a reflection of the Jehoiada of 2Kings xi., xii., and
the allegation that Zadok at that time joined David at the head of
twenty-two chief priests is a hardly credible substitute for what
is stated in Samuel, according to which Abiathar, whose older
claims were disagreeable to the B'ne Zadok and those who came
later, was the priest who from the beginning held with David; the
twenty-two chief priests appear to correspond to the heads of the
twenty-two post-exilian priestly families (Nehemiah xii. 1-7,
12-21, x. 3-9; 1Chronicles xxiv. 7-18). Yet it is hardly necessary
to go so minutely into the contents of the above lists, for the
purpose with which they are given is stated without
circumlocution at the close (2Chronicles xii. 38, 39): "All these
men of war, in order of battle, came with a perfect heart to Hebron
to make David king over all Israel, and all the rest of Israel also
were of one heart to make David king. And they were there with David
three days, eating and drinking, for there was joy in Israel."
After the explication of the idea "all Israel" thus inappropriately
interpolated, the narrative proceeds to reproduce the contents of 2
Samuel v.-vii. David's first deed, after the conquest of the
stronghold of Jebus, is in Chronicles to make it the holy city
by transferring the ark of Jehovah thither (xiii. 1 seq.). It
seems as if the building of a palace and the Philistine war
(2Samuel v. 11-25) were to be omitted; but after the narrative in
2Samuel vi. 1 seq. has been given down to the place "and the ark
of Jehovah abode in the house of Obed-edom three months " (1Chronicles
xiii. 14 = 2Samuel vi. 11), the pause of a quarter of a
year is utilised for the purpose of overtaking what had been left
out (xiv. 1-17 = 2Samuel v. 11-25), and then the history of
the ark is completed. This indeed is to separate things mutually
connected, but at the same time the secular business which,
according to the older narrative, is the nearest and most
pressing, is reduced to the level of a mere episode in the midst of
the sacred. That there is no room for the building of a house and
a Philistine war within the three months which offer themselves so
conveniently for the interpolation is a subordinate affair.
As regards the sacred business, the transference of the ark to
Zion, almost everything that is said in 2Samuel vi. is repeated
word for word in Chronicles also (xiii., xv., xvi., xvii. 1).
Two traits only are absent in Chronicles, and in neither case is
the omission helpful to the connection David's wife Michal, it is
said in 2Samuel vi. 16, 20-23, when she saw the king dancing and
leaping in the procession, despised him in her heart; afterwards
when he came home she told him what she thought of his unworthy
conduct. The first of these two statements is found in Chronicles
also (xv. 29), but the second is (all but the introductory
notice, xvi. 43 = 2Samuel vi. 20, here torn from its connection)
omitted, although it contains the principal fact, for the
historical event was the expression of her contempt, not its
psychological origin; a woman--such is the idea--must not say a
thing like that to David. The other case is quite similar. On
account of the calamity by which those who were bringing up the
ark were overtaken, David does not at first venture to receive it
into his citadel, but deposits it in the house of Obed-edom, one
of his captains; but when Jehovah blesses the house of Obed-edom,
he takes courage to bring the ark to his own home (2Samuel vi. 10-12).
Chronicles also tells that Jehovah blessed the house of Obed-edom
(xiii. 14), but mentions no consequent result; again the cause is
given without the effect. Another explanation is substituted;
David perceived that the disaster connected with the removal of
the ark was due to the fact of its not having been carried by the
Levites in accordance with the Law; the Levites accordingly were
made to bear it and no harm ensued (xv. 2, 13-15). This is in complete
and manifest contradiction to the older narrative, and as Chronicles
(chapter xiii.) copies that narrative, it also contradicts itself
(xiii. 10), and that all the more strikingly as by the addition
in xiii. 2 it represents the accompanying clergy as tacitly
approving the carrying of the ark on the ox-cart. Then due
participation in the sacred procession having been thus once
secured them, 1Chronicles xv. positively revels in priests
and Levites, of whom not a sing]e word is to be found in 2 Samuel
vi., and moreover a sort of musical service is instituted by
David himself before the ark, and a festal cantata made up by him
out of post-exilian psalms is quoted (chapter xvi.). In this way,
out of the original narrative, the scattered fragments of which
now show themselves very strangely in the new connection,
something quite different has grown. "In the former everything is
free, simply the affair of king and people, here all is priestly
ceremonial; there the people with their king shout and dance with
joy before the ark,, here the levites are the musicians and
singers in formal order. To seek to combine the two versions is
wholly against the laws of historical interpretation. If the
first were curt and condensed the unification of the two might
perhaps be possible, but no story could be more particular or
graphic, and could it have been that the Levites alone should be
passed over in silence if they had played so very important a
part? The author of Chronicles was able to introduce them only
by distorting and mutilating his original and landing himself in
contradiction after all. He cannot allow anything to happen
without Levites; and was the ark of the covenant to be fetched to
Jerusalem without them? was the Law to be even a second time
broken under the pious king David? This seemed to him impossible.
That Uzzah perished in the first attempt to fetch the ark, and
that on the second occasion--when only a quite short journey is
spoken of--the ark was carried, ~2Samuel vi. 13, may have been
the suggestions by which he was led. Fertile in combinations,
he profited by the hint." So, justly, De Wette (Beitraege, i.
88-91).
The narrative of 2Samuel vi. having been broken off at the first
half of ver. 19 (1Chronicles xvi. 3), the second half of the verse
and the beginning of the next are reproduced (xvi. 43) after the
interpolation of xvi. 4-42, and then 2Samuel vii. is appended
word for word (1Chronicles xvii.),--the resolution of David to build
a house for the ark, and what Jehovah said to him about the
subject through Nathan. The point of the prophet's address turns
on the antithesis (2Samuel vii.). "Thou wilt build a house FOR
ME? rather will I build a house FOR THEE;" the house of David
is of course the Davidic dynasty. But an interpolation has
already crept into the text of Samuel (vii. 13), which
apprehends the antithesis thus: "THOU wilt build a house for me?
Nay, THY SON shall build a house for me." Now Chronicles, for which
David comes into consideration merely as the proper founder of the
Solomonic temple, takes up the narrative of 2 Samuel vii. precisely
on account of this interpolation, as is clear from xxii. 9, 10--
increases the misunderstanding by going back to it in an addition
(xvii. 14)--and at the outset destroys the original antithesis
by the innocent alteration, "Thou shalt not build THE HOUSE for me"
instead of "Wilt thou build A house for me? "The house can here
mean only that imperatively needed one, long kept in view alike
by God and men, which must by all means he built, only not by David
but by Solomon; it is without any ambiguity the temple, and does not,
like a house, contain that possibility of a double meaning on
which the original point depends. It is interesting also to compare
2Samuel vii. 14 with 1Chronicles xvii. 13: "I will be to thy seed
a father, and he shall be to me a son. _If he commit iniquity,
then I will chasten him with the rod of men, and with the stripes
of the sons of men; but_ my mercy shall not depart from him."
The words in italics are wanting in Chronicles; the meaning, that
Jehovah will not withdraw His grace from the dynasty of Judah
altogether, even though some of its members should deserve
punishment, is thereby destroyed and volatilised into an abstract
idealism, which shows that to the writer the Davidic kingly
family is known only as a dissolving view, and not by historical
experience as it is to the author of 2Samuel vii.
In chaps xviii.-xx., Chronicles seems to refresh itself with a
little variety, relating as it does the foreign wars of David
after the order of 2Samuel, viii., x., xi. 1, xii. 30, 30, xxi.
18-22. But in this it still keeps in view its purpose, which is
directed towards David as founder of the Jerusalem worship;
those wars brought him the wealth that was required for the
building of the temple. On the other hand, everything so
fully and beautifully told in the Book of Samuel about the
home occurrences of that period is omitted, for after all
it does not contribute much to the glorification of the king.
So the story of Meribaal and Ziba (chap. ix.), of Bathsheba and
Uriah (xi., xii.), of Tamar and Amnon (xiii., xiv.), of Absalom's
rebellion (xv.-xx.), and of the delivering-up of the sons of Saul
(xxi. 1-14). The rude and mechanical manner in which statements
about foreign wars are torn from the connection with domestic
events in which they stand in the older narrative is shown in
1Chronicles xx. 1, 2, as compared with 2Samuel xi. 1, xii. 30.
In 2Samuel xi. the mention of the fact that David remained
in Jerusalem when the army set out against Rabbah, prepares for
the story of his adultery with the wife of a captain engaged
in active service in the field; but 1Chronicles xx. 1 is
meaningless, and involves a contradiction with ver. 2. according
to which David appears after all in the camp at Rabbah, although
the connection,--namely, that he followed the army--and all
the intermediate occurrences relating to Bathsheba and Uriah, are
left out (De Wette, pp. 19, 20, 60). To what extent the veil is
drawn over the scandalous falls of saints may be judged also from
the fact that from the list of David's foreign encounters also,
which are otherwise fully given, a single one is omitted which he
is supposed not to have come through with absolute honour, that
with the giant Ishbi-benob (2Samuel xxi. 15-17). Lastly, the
alteration made in 1Chronicles xx. 5 is remarkable. Elhanan the
son of Jair of Bethlehem, we read in 2Samuel xxi. 19, was he who
slew Goliath of Gath, the shaft of whose spear was as thick as a
weaver's beam. But on the other hand, had not David of Bethlehem
according to 1Samuel xvii. vanquished Goliath the giant, the
shaft of whose spear was as thick as a weaver's beam? In
Chronicles accordingly Elhanan smites the brother of the
veritable Goliath.
2. The closing chapters of 2Samuel (xxi.-xxiv.) are, admittedly,
an appendix of very peculiar structure. The thread of xxi. 1-14
is continued in xxiv. 1-25, but in the interval between the two
passages occurs xxi. 15-xxiii. 39, in a very irrational manner,
perhaps wholly due to chance. In this interposed passage itself,
again, the quite similar lists xxi. 15-22 and xxiii. 8-39 are
very closely connected; and the two songs, xxii. 1-51, xxiii.
1-7, are thus an interpolation within an interpolation. This
want of order is imitated by the author of Chronicles also,
who takes 2Samuel xxiii. 8-39 as separated from xxi. 15-22,
and gives 2Samuel xxiv. last, a position which does not belong
to it from any material considerations, but merely because it
had originally been tagged on as an appendix, and besides had
been separated from its connection with xxi. 1-14 by a
large interpolation.
1Chronicles xxi. (the pestilence as punishment of David's sin
in numbering the people, and the theophany as occasioning the
building of an altar on the threshing-floor of Araunah) is on the
whole a copy of 2Samuel xxiv., but with omission of the precise
and interesting geographical details of ver. 5 seq, and with
introduction of a variety of improving touches. Thus (xxi. 1):
"And Satan stood up against Israel and moved David;" instead
of: "And the anger of Jehovah was kindled against Israel, and he
moved David." Similarly (xxi. 6): "Levi and Benjamin Joab
counted not among them; for the king's word was abominable to him,"--
an addition which finds its explanation on the one hand in Numbers
i. 49, and on the other in the circumstance that the holy city lay
within the territory of Benjamin. Again (xxi. 16, 27): "David
saw the angel of Jehovah standing between heaven and earth, and
his sword drawn in his hand and stretched out towards Jerusalem;"
compare this with Sam xxiv. 16 (1Chronicles xxi. t5): "The angel
stretched out his hand to Jerusalem to destroy it, and he was
by the threshing floor of Araunah;" according to the older view,
angels have no wings (Genesis xxviii.). Further (xxi. 25):
"David gave to Araunah for his threshing-floor 600 shekels of
gold ;" compare with 2Samuel xxiv. 24, 50 shekels of silver;
to make the king pay right royally costs the Chronicler nothing.
But lastly, his most significant addition is the fire from
heaven which consumes the burnt-offering (xxi. 26); by this means
the altar on the threshing-floor of Araunah, in other words,
that of the sanctuary of Jerusalem, is intended to be put on
a level with that of the tabernacle, its predecessor, the fire
on which was also kindled from heaven (Leviticus ix. 24).
Whoever has understood the narratives of altar-buildings by
the Patriarchs, by Joshua, Gideon, and Manoah, will grant that
the author of Chronicles has quite correctly understood the
intention of 2Samuel xxiv., in accordance with which he here
proposes to relate the divine inauguration of the place of worship
at Jerusalem; but what in that passage, as in similar older
legends about the indication of consecrated places by means of a
theophany, is only hinted at for contemporaries who understood
the idea conveyed, he requires to retouch strongly in order that
a later generation may notice it; and yet he has half spoiled
the point by making the angel not stand by the threshing-floor of
Araunah on the sacred spot, but hover aloft in the air.
2Samuel xxiv. = 1Chronicles xxi. serves further as a starting point
for the free construction of 1Chronicles xxii.-xxix. The
circumstance that in the last chapter of the Book of Samuel David
builds the altar at Jerusalem is expanded into the statement that
in the last year of his reign he prepared beforehand the building
of the temple of Solomon in all its parts down to the minutest
detail. Unhampered by historical tradition, the author here
expatiates with absolute freedom in his proper element. All that
has hitherto been said about the king on the basis of the older
source is by means of additions and omissions fashioned into what
shall serve as a mere prologue to the proper work of his life,
which is now described thoroughly _con amore_. He himself
unfortunately has not been allowed to build the house, having
shed much blood and carried on great wars (xxii. 8, xxviii. 3),
but he yet in the last year of his reign forestalls from his
successor the whole merit of the business (xxiii. 1, xxviii. 1).
My son Solomon, he says, is young and tender, but the house to be
built for Jehovah must be great and glorious; I will therefore
prepare it for him (xxii. 5). Accordingly he gets ready
beforehand the workmen and artificers, in particular bringing into
requisition the non-Israelitic population; he provides the
material, stone and wood and brass and iron, and gold and silver
and jewels without number; he also gives the plan or rather
receives it direct from Jehovah, and that in black and white
(xxviii. 19), while Moses built the tabernacle only according to
his recollection of the heavenly pattern which had been shown to
him on Sinai. But before all he appoints the _personnel_ for the
temple service,--priests, Levites, porters, singers,-divides their
thousands into classes, and assigns to them their functions by
lot. In doing so he interests himself, naturally, with special
preference, in the music, being the designer of the instruments
(xxiii. 5), and himself acting as principal conductor (xxv. 2,
6). And as he is still king after all, he at the close takes an
inventory also of his secular state, after having duly ordered
the spiritual. All this he does for the future, for his son and
successor; not in reality, but only in plan, are the door-keepers,
for example, assigned to their posts (xxvi. 12 seq.), but none
the less with strictest specification and designation of the
localities of the temple,--and that too the second temple! His
preparations concluded, David calls a great assembly of prelates
and notables (xxiii. 1, xxviii. 1), has Solomon anointed as king,
and Zadok as priest (xxix. 22), and in a long discourse hands over
to the former along with the kingdom the task of his reign,
namely, the execution of what he himself has prepared and
appointed; on this occasion yet more precious stones and noble
metals--among them gold of Ophir and Persian darics--are presented
by David and the princes for the sacred building. The whole
section 1Chronicles xxii.-xxix. is a startling instance of that
statistical phantasy of the Jews which revels in vast sums of
money on paper (xxii. 14), in artificial marshallings of names
and numbers (xxiii.-xxvii.), in the enumeration of mere subjects
without predicates, which simply stand on parade and neither
signify nor do anything. The monotony is occasionally broken
only by unctuous phrases, but without refreshing the reader.
Let the experiment of reading the chapters through be tried.
According to 1Kings i., ii., King David in his closing days was
sick and feeble in body and mind, and very far from being in a
condition thus to make preparations on behalf of his successor
shortly before his own death, or to prepare his bread for him so
far that nothing remained but to put it into the oven. His
purpose of building a house to Jehovah is indeed spoken of in
2 Samuel vii. in connection with vi. 17, but it is definitively
abandoned in consequence of Jehovah's refusal, on the ground that
it is not man's part to build a house for God, but God's to build
a house for man. In strange contrast with this explanation is
that of Chronicles that David is a man of war and has shed much
blood, and therefore dare not set up the temple; that he had waged
the wars of Jehovah, that Jehovah had given victory by his hand,
would in the older warlike time have seemed no reason against but
rather an argument establishing his fitness for such a work. But
the worst discrepancy is that between the solemn installation of
Solomon as king and of Zadok as priest with all the forms of law
and publicity as related in 1Chronicles xxviii., xxix. (comp.
xxii., xxiii. 1) and the older narrative of 1Kings i., ii.
According to the latter it was much more an ordinary palace
intrigue, by means of which one party at court succeeded in
obtaining from the old king, enfeebled with age, his sanction for
Solomon's succession. Until then Adonijah had been regarded as
heir-apparent to the throne, by David himself, by all Israel,
and the great officers of the kingdom, Joab and Abiathar; what
above all things turned the scale in favour of Solomon was the
weight of Benaiah's six hundred praetorians, a formidable force
in the circumstances of the period. The author of Chronicles
naively supposes he has successfully evaded all difficulties
by giving out the coronation of Solomon related by himself
to be the second (xxix. 22),--an advertence to 1Kings i., ii.
which does not remove but only betrays the contradiction.
Yet this is as nothing over against the disharmony of the total
impression. See what Chronicles has made out of David! The
founder of the kingdom has become the founder of the temple and
the public worship, the king and hero at the head of his
companions in arms has become the singer and master of ceremonies
at the head of a swarm of priests and Levites; his clearly cut
figure has become a feeble holy picture, seen through a cloud of
incense. It is obviously vain to try to combine the
fundamentally different portraits into one stereoscopic image;
it is only the tradition of the older source that possesses
historical value. In Chronicles this is clericalised in the taste
of the post-exilian time, which had no feeling longer for anything
but cultus and torah, which accordingly treated as alien the old
history (which, nevertheless, was bound to be a sacred history),
if it did not conform with its ideas and metamorphose itself into
church history. Just as the law framed by Ezra as the foundation
of Judaism was regarded as having been the work of Moses, so what
upon this basis had been developed after Moses--particularly the
music of the sanctuary and the ordering of the temple
_personnel_---was carried back to King David, the sweet singer of
Israel, who had now to place his music at the service of the
cultus, and write psalms along with Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun,
the Levitical singing families.
VI.I.3. With regard to Solomon, Chronicles (2Chronicles i.-ix.)
nowhere departs very far from the lines of the Book of Kings.
As the story of 1Kings i., ii., which is not an edifying one, and
mercilessly assails that of 1Chronicles xxii.-xxix., required to
be omitted, the narrative accordingly begins with 1Kings iii., with
Solomon's accession, sacrifices on the great altar at Gibeon, and
the revelation of Jehovah, which was thereupon communicated to him
in a dream. This last is transcribed with slight alterations,
but at the outset a characteristic divergence is found. "Solomon
loved Jehovah, walking in the statutes of David his father, only
he sacrificed and burnt incense on the high places (because
there was no house built unto the name of Jehovah until those
days). And the king went to Gibeon to sacrifice there; for that
was the great high place; a thousand burnt-offerings did Solomon
offer upon that altar, and Jehovah appeared unto him in a dream:
Ask what I shall give thee." So 1Kings iii. 2 seq. Chronicles,
after its manner, first surrounds the king with a great assemblage
of captains of hundreds and thousands, of judges and princes
and heads of houses, and purely Pentateuchal dignities, and then
proceeds:
"And Solomon and all the congregation with him went to
the high place in Gibeon, for there was God's tent of meeting,
which Moses, the servant of God, had made in the wilderness.
But the ark of God had David brought up from Kirjath-jearim,
where he had prepared for it; for he had pitched a tent for it
at Jerusalem. But the brazen altar that Bezaleel, the son of Uri,
the son of Hur, had made, stood there, before the tabernacle of
Jehovah, and Solomon and the congregation sought unto it. And
Solomon offered there, upon the brazen altar, before Jehovah,
by the tent of meeting, he offered a thousand burnt-offerings,
and God appeared to him in a dream, saying, Ask what I shall
give thee" (2Chronicles i. 3 seq.).
In the older narrative there is nothing about the tabernacle,
it being assumed that no apology would be either necessary or
possible for Solomon having sacrificed on a high place. Chronicles,
dominated in its views of antiquity by the Priestly Code, has
missed the presence of the tabernacle and supplied the want in
accordance with that norm; the young and pious king could not
possibly have made his solemn inaugural sacrifice, for which
he had expressly left Jerusalem, anywhere else than at the
legally prescribed place; and still less could Jehovah otherwise
have bestowed on him His blessing. It betokens the narrowness,
and at the same time the boldness of the author, that he retains
the expression _high place_ used in 1Kings iii. 3, and co-ordinates
it with _tabernacle_, although the one means precisely the opposite
of the other. But it is instructive to notice how, on other
occasions, he is hampered by his Mosaic central sanctuary, which
he has introduced _ad hoc_ into the history. According to 1Chronicles
xvi. David is in the best position to institute also a sacrificial
service beside the ark of Jehovah, which he has transferred to
Zion; but he dare not, for the Mosaic altar stands at Gibeon, and
he must content himself with a musical surrogate (vers. 37-42).
The narrative of 1Chronicles xxi., that David was led by the
theophany at the threshing-floor of Araunah to build an altar
there, and present upon it an offering that was accepted by
heaven, is at its close maimed and spoiled in a similar way by
the remark, with anticipatory reference to 2Chronicles i., that the
Mosaic tabernacle and altar of burnt offering were indeed at that
time in the high place at Gibeon, but that the king had not the
strength to go before it to inquire of Jehovah, being so smitten
with fear of the angel with the drawn sword. So also must the
sacrifice which Solomon should have offered on his return from
Gibeon before the ark at Jerusalem be similarly ignored (2Chronicles
i. 13), because it uould destroy the force of the previous
explanation of the high place at Gibeon. Thus the shadow takes
the air from the body. In other places the tabernacle is
significantly confounded with the temple of Jerusalem (Graf, p. 56),
but on the whole it remains a tolerably inert conception, only made
use of in the passage before us (2Chronicles i.) in an _ex machina_
manner in order to clear Solomon of a heavy reproach.
Upon the last solemn act of worship at the Mosaic sanctuary
immediately follows the building of the temple (i. 18 [ii.1]-vii. 11),
1Kings iii. 10-v. 14 [AV. 34] being passed over. A few little
touches are however brought in to show the wealth of Solomon
(i. 14-17); they do not occur in Kings until chap. x. (vers. 26-29),
and are also repeated in Chronicles (ix. 25 seq.) in this much
more appropriate connection (comp. 1Kings iii., LXX). Strictly
speaking indeed, David has taken the preparations for the sacred
building out of the hands of his successor, but the latter
appears not to be satisfied with these (ii. 16 [17]) and looks
after them once more (i. 18-ii. 17 [ii. 1-18]). A comparison
with Ezra iii. (preparation of the second temple) shows that
the story is an elaboration of the author, although suggested
by 1Kings v. 16 [2] seq., and with preservation of many verbal
reminiscences. While Hiram and Solomon according to the older
record are on a footing of equality and make a contract based
on reciprocity of service, the Tyrian king is here the vassal
of the Israelite, and renders to him what he requires as tribute;
instead of as there explaining himself by word of mouth, he here
writes a letter in which he not only openly avows his faith in
Jehovah the God of Israel, the maker of heaven and earth, but
also betrays an extraordinary acquaintance with the Pentateuchal
Priestly Code. The brassfounder whom Solomon brings from Tyre
(1Kings vii. 13, 14) is (ii. 13) described as a very Daedalus
and prodigy of artistic skill, like Bezaleel (Exodus xxxi. 2 seq.);
his being made the son of a woman of Dan and not of a widow of
Naphtali supplies interpreters with the materials for the
construction of a little family romance, /1/
******************************************
1. She was by birth a woman of Dan, married into the tribe of
Napthali, lost her husband, and as widow out of the tribe of
Naphtali became the wife of the Tyrian. So Bertheau _in loc_.
***************************************
but has no more real value than the idea that sandalwood is
obtained from Lebanon. The statement of 1Kings v. 27 [13]
(xi. 28, xii. 4) that Israel was requisitioned in large numbers
to render forced service to the king has substituted for it by
the Chronicler that which occurs in another place (1Kings ix. 2I),
that only the Canaanite serfs were employed for this purpose; at
the same time, he reckons their number from the figures supplied
in 1Kings v. 29 [15] seq. Lastly, the manner in which Solomon
(ii. 2 [3] ) assures Hiram that he will arrange the divine
service in the new house in a thoroughly correct manner according
to the ordinance of the Priestly Code, is also characteristic;
similar remarks, from which the uninterrupted practice of the
Mosaic cultus according to the rules of the Law is made to appear,
are afterwards repeated from time to time (viii. 12-16, xiii. 11).
In chaps. iii., iv. the author repeats the description of the
temple in 1Kings vi., vii., with the omission of what relates to
profane buildings. Perhaps in one passage (1Kings vii. 23) he
found the now very corrupt text in a better state; otherwise he
has excerpted from it in a wretchedly careless style or word for
word transcribed it, adding merely a few extravagances or
appointments of later date (e.g., the specification of the gold
in iii. 4 seq. 8, 9, of the ten golden tables and hundred golden
basins in iv. 8, of the brass-covered doors of the outer gateway
in iv. 9, of the court of the priests in iv. 9, of the curtain
between the holy place and the holy of holies in iii. 14;
compare Vatke, pp. 332, 333, 340, 341). To deny that the
original (to which reference must in many places be made in order
that the meaning may be understood) exists in 1Kings vi., vii.,
requires an exercise of courage which might be much better
employed, all the more because in 2Chronicles iv. 11-v. 1, the
summary list follows the description of details precisely as in
1Kings vii. 40 - 51.
While the concrete and material details of 1Kings vi., vii. are
reproduced only in an imperfect and cursory manner, the act of
consecration on the other hand, and the discourse delivered by
Solomon on the occasion, is accurately and fully given (v. 2-vii.
10) in accordance with 1Kings viii.; such additions and
omissions as occur are all deliberate. In 1Kings viii. the
priests and Levites on an occasion which so closely concerned
their interests do not play any adequate part, and in particular
give none of the music which nevertheless is quite indispensable
at any such solemnity. Accordingly, the Chronicler at the word
"priests" inserts between the violently separated clauses of 1Kings
viii. 10, 11, the following:
"For all the priests present had sanctified themselves without
distinction of classes, and the Levites, the singers, all stood in
white linen with cymbals and psalteries and harps at the east end
of the altar, and with them an hundred and twenty priests sounding
with trumpets. And it came to pass when the trumpeters and singers
were as one to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking
the Lord, and when the music began with trumpets, and cymbals, and
instruments, and the song of praise,
Praise ye Jehovah,
for He is good;
for His mercy endureth for ever,
then the house was filled with a cloud" (v. 11-13).
Proceeding, the narrative of 1Kings viii. 22 that Solomon came
in front of the altar and there prayed is indeed in the first
instance copied (vi. 12), but forthwith authoritatively interpreted
in the sense that the king did not really and actually stand before
the altar (which was lawful for the priests alone), but upon an
improvised pulpit in the inner court upon a propped-up caldron of
brass (vi. 13), an excellent idea, which has met with the due
commendation of expositors. The close of Solomon's prayer (1Kings
viii. 49-53) is abridged (vi. 39, 40)--perhaps in order to get rid
of viii. 50--and there is substituted for it an original epilogue
(vi. 41, 42) recalling post-exilian psalms. Then comes a larger
omission, that of 1Kings viii. 54-61, explained by the difficulty
involved in the king's here kneeling, not upon the caldron,
but before the altar, then standing up and blessing like a priest;
in place of this it is told (vii. 1-3) how the altar was consecrated
by fire from heaven, which indeed had already descended upon it
(1Chronicles xxi.26), but as it appears had unaccountably gone out.
In vii. 4 the author again returns to his original at 1Kings
viii. 62 seq., but tricks it out, wherever it appears to him too
bare, with trumpeting priests and singing Levites (vii. 6),
and finally dismisses the people, not on the eighth day of
the feast of tabernacles (1Kings viii. 66), but on the ninth
(vii. to), in accordance with the enactment in Numbers xxix. 35.
The rest of Solomon's history (vii. 11-ix. 28) is taken over from
1Kings ix., x. In doing so what is said in 1Kings ix. 10-IO,
to the effect that Solomon handed over to Hiram twenty Galilaean
cities, is changed into the opposite--that Hiram ceded the cities
to Solomon, who settled them with Israelites (viii. 1, 2); and
similarly the already observed statement of 1Kings ix. 24
about the removal of Solomon's Egyptian wife out of the city of
David into his new palace /1/ is altered and put in quite a
****************************************
1. Even in the text of Kings this statement has been obscured;
Comp. 1Kings iii. 1. In ix. 24 we must at least say _betho
asher bana lo_, but this perhaps is not enough.
****************************************
false light:
"Solomon brought up the daughter of Pharaoh out of the
city of David unto the house that he had built for her; for he
said, No woman shall dwell in the house of David, for the place
is holy whereunto the ark of Jehovah hath come" (viii. 11).
There is no further need to speak of viii. 12-16 (1Kings ix. 25);
more indifferent in their character are the addition in vii.
12-15, a mere compilation of reminiscences, the embellishment in
viii. 3-6, derived from 1Kings ix. 17-19, and the variations in
viii. 17 seq., ix. 2I, misunderstood from 1Kings ix. 26 seq.,
x. 22. The concluding chapter on Solomon's reign (1Kings xi.),
in which the king does not appear in his most glorious aspect, is
passed over in silence, for the same motives as those which
dictated the omission of the two chapters at the beginning.
The history of the son is treated after the same plan and by the
same means as that of the father, only the subject accommodates
itself more readily to the purpose of the change. The old
picture is retouched in such wise that all dark and repulsive
features are removed, and their place taken by new and brilliant
bits of colour not in the style of the original but in the taste of
the author's period,--priests and Levites and fire from heaven, and
the fulfilment of all righteousness of the law, and much music,
and all sorts of harmless legendary anachronisms and
exaggerations besides. The material of tradition seems broken up
in an extraneous medium, the spirit of post-exilian Judaism.
VI.II.
VI.II.1. After Solomon's death the history of Israel in Chronicles
is traced only through Jehovah's kingdom in the hand of the sons
of David, and all that relates to the ten tribes is put aside.
For according to the notions of the Judaistic period Israel is the
congregation of true worship, and this last is connected with the
temple at Jerusalem, in which of course the Samaritans have no
part. Abijah of Judah makes this point of view clear to Jeroboam
I. and his army in a speech delivered from Mount Zemaraim before
the battle.
"Think ye to withstand the kingdom of Jehovah in the
hand of the sons of David, because ye are a great multitude, and
with you are the golden calves which Jeroboam made you for gods ?
Have ye not cast out the priests of Jehovah, the sons of Aaron and
the Levites, and made for yourselves priests after the manner of
the Gentiles? so that whosoever cometh to fill his hands with a
young bullock and seven rams, even he may become a priest for the
false gods? But as for us, we have not forsaken Jehovah our God,
and our priests minister to Jehovah, the sons of Aaron and the
Levites in the service; and they burn unto Jehovah every morning
and every evening burnt sacrifices and sweet incense; the shewbread
also is upon the pure table; for we have maintained the service of
Jehovah our God, but ye have forsaken Him. And behold, God Himself
is with us at our head, and His priests, and the loud-sounding
trumpets to cry an alarm against you. O children of Israel,
fight ye not against Jehovah the God of your fathers, for ye shall
not prosper" (2Chronicles xiii. 8-12; comp. xi. 13-17).
The kingdom which bore the name of Israel was actually in point of
fact in the olden time the proper Israel, and Judah was merely a
kind of appendage to it. When Amaziah of Judah after the
conquest of the Edomites challenged to battle King Jehoash of
Samaria, whose territory had at that time suffered to the utmost
under the continual wars with the Syrians, the latter bid say to
him:
"The thistle that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar that was
in Lebanon, saying, Give thy daughter to my son to wife;--then
passed by a wild beast that was in Lebanon and trode down the
thistle. Thou hast indeed smitten Edom, and thy heart hath
lifted thee up. Enjoy thy glory, but tarry at home."
(2Kings xiv. 9, 10). And as the other would not listen, he
punished him as if he had been a naughty boy and then let him go.
Religiously the relative importance of the two corresponded
pretty nearly to what it was politically and historically.
Israel was the cradle of prophecy; Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha
exercised their activity there; what contemporary figure from
Judah is there to place alongside of these? Assuredly the author
of the Book of Kings would not have forgotten them had any such
there been, for he is a Judaean with all his heart, yet is compelled
purely by the nature of the case to interest himself chiefly about
the northern kingdom. And yet again at the very close it was the
impending fall of Samaria that called into life a new phase of
prophecy; he who inaugurated it, the Judaean Amos of Tekoah, was
sent not to Judah but to Israel, the history of which had the
first and fullest sympathy of his inmost soul as that of the people
of Jehovah. Isaiah was the first who placed Jerusalem in the centre
of his field of vision and turned away from Israel; for at the time
of his first public appearance war was raging between the sister
nations, and when his activity was at its acme all was over with
the northern kingdom and all hope had to cling to the remnant,--
the fallen tabernacle of David. As regards the cultus, certainly,
matters may have been somewhat less satisfactory in Israel than
in Judah, at least in the last century before the Assyrian captivity,
but at the outset there was no essential difference. On all hands
Jehovah was worshipped as the peculiar divinity of the nation at
numerous fanes, in the service at the high places there were wanting
neither in the one nor in the other sacred trees, posts, and
stones, images of silver and gold (Isaiah ii. 8 seq., xvii. 8,
xxxi. 22; Micah v. 12). It is a question whether in the time
before Hezekiah the cultus of the kingdom at Jerusalem had so much
to distinguish it above that at Bethel or at Dan; against
Jeroboam's golden calves must be set the brazen serpent of Moses,
and the ark of Jehovah itself--which in ancient times was an idol
(1Samuel iv.-vi.) and did not become idealised into an ark of the
covenant, ie., of the law, until probably it had actually
disappeared. As for the prophetic reaction against the popular
cultus, the instance of Hosea shows that it came into activity as
early and as powerfully in Israel as in Judah. Even after
Josiah's reformation Jeremiah complains that the sister who
hitherto had been spared is in no respect better than the other
who a hundred years before had fallen a victim to the Assyrians
(iii. 6-1O); and though in principle the author of the Book of
Kings, taking his stand upon Deuteronomy, prefers Judah and
Jerusalem, yet he does not out of deference to this judgment alter
the facts which show that old Israel was not further than old
Judah from compliance with the Deuteronomic precepts. Chronicles,
on the other hand, not only takes the Law--the Pentachal Law
as a whole, but more particularly the Priestly Code therein
preponderating--as its rule of judgment on the past; but also
idealises the facts in accordance with that norm, and figures to
itself the old Hebrew people as in exact conformity with the
pattern of the later Jewish community,--as a monarchically graded
hierocracy with a strictly centralised cultus of rigidly
prescribed form at the holy place of Jerusalem. When,
accordingly, the ten tribes fail to exhibit all the marks of the
kingdom of God, this is taken to mean their falling away from the
true Israel; they have made goats and calves their gods, driven
away the priests and Levites, and in a word broken quite away
from the institutions which shaped themselves in Judah during the
period subsequent to Josiah and received their finishing-touches
from Ezra. /1/
***************************************
1. The Chronicler indeed is unable, even in the case of these
schismatics, to divest himself of his legal notions, as appears
almost comically in the circumstance that the priests of Jeroboam
set about their heretical practices quite in accordance with the
prescriptions of the Priestly Code, and procure their
consecration by means of a great sacrifice (2 Chron xiii. 9).
****************************************
Like other heathen, therefore, they are taken account of by the
sacred history only in so far as they stood in relations of
friendship or hostility with the people of Jehovah properly so
called, the Israel in the land of Judah (2Chronicles xxiii. 2),
and in all references to them the most sedulous and undisguised
partisanship on behalf of Judah is manifested, even by the
inhabitants of the northern kingdom itself. /2/ If one seriously
***********************************
2. Compare xi. 16, xv. 9, xix. 2, xx. 35 seq.. xxv 7, xxviii.
9 seq., xxx. 6.
***********************************
takes the Pentateuch as Mosaic law, this exclusion of the ten
tribes is, in point of fact, an inevitable consequence, for the
mere fact of their belonging to the people of Jehovah destroys the
fundamental pre-supposition of that document, the unity and
legitimacy of the worship as basis of the theocracy, the priests
and Levites as its most important organs, "the sinews and muscles
of the body politic, which keep the organism together as a living
and moving whole."
VI.II.2. The reverse side is, of course, the idealisation of Judah
from the point of view of the legitimate worship,--a process which
the reader can imagine from the specimens already given with
reference to David and Solomon. The priests and Levites who
migrated from Israel are represented as having strengthened the
southern kingdom (xi. 17), and here constitute the truly
dominant element in the history. It is for their sake that kings
exist as protectors and guardians of the cultus, with the internal
arrangements of which, however, they dare not intermeddle (xxvi.
16 seq.); to deliver discourses and ordain spiritual solemnities
(which figure as the culminating points in the narrative) are
among the leading duties of their reign. /1/
**************************************
1. xiii. 7 seq., xv. 10 seq., xx. 6 seq., xxix. 5 seq., xxx. 1 seq.,
xxxv. 1 seq.
**************************************
Those among them who are good apprehend their task and are
inseparable from the holy servants of Jehovah,--so, in particular,
Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, and Josiah. Of the first mentioned we are
told that in the third year of his reign he appointed a royal
commission of notables, priests, and Levites, to go about with the
Book of the Law, and teach in the cities of Judah (xvii. 7-9); in
the larger places, in the strongholds, he further instituted
colleges of justice, and over them a supreme tribunal at
Jerusalem, also consisting of priests, Levites, and notables,
under the presidency of the high priest for spiritual, and of the
Prince of the house of Judah for secular affairs (xix. 5-11).
There is nothing about this in the Book of Kings, although what is
of less importance is noticed (1Kings xxii. 47); the Chronicler
makes the statement in his own language, which is unmistakable,
especially in the pious speeches. Probably it is the
organisation of justice as existing in his own day that he here
carries back to Jehoshaphat, so that here most likely we have the
oldest testimony to the synedrium of Jerusalem as a court of
highest instance over the provincial synedria, as also to its
composition and presidency. The impossibility of such a judiciary
system in antiquity is clear from its presupposing the Book of
the Law as its basis, from its co-ordination of priests and
Levites, and also from its actual inconsistency with incidental
notices, particularly in Isaiah and the older prophets (down to
Jeremiah xxvi.), in which it everywhere is taken for granted as a
thing of course that the rulers are also at the same time the
natural judges. Moreover, Chronicles already tells us about
David something similar to what it says about Jehoshaphat
(1Chronicles xxiii. 4, xxvi. 29-32); the reason why the latter
is selected by preference for this work lies simply in his name
" Jehovah is Judge," as he himself is made to indicate in various
ways (xix. 5-11; compare Joel iv. 12). But the king of Judah
is strengthened by the priests and Levites, not only in these
domestic affairs, but also for war. As the trumpets of the priests
give to Abijah courage and the victory against Jeroboam of
Israel, so do the Levites also to Jehoshaphat against Moab and
Ammon. Having fasted, and received, while praying, the
comfortable assurance of the singer Jahaziel ("See God"), he
advances next morning, with his army, against the enemy, having
in the van the Levites, who march in sacred attire in front of
the armed men and sing:
"Praise ye the Lord, for His mercy endureth for ever."
He then finds that the fighting has already been done by the enemy
themselves, who, at the sound of that song of praise, have fallen
upon and annihilated one another. Three days are spent in
dividing the spoil, and then he returns as he came, the Levitical
music leading the van, with psalteries, and harps, and trumpets to
the house of Jehovah (2Chronicles xx. 1-28). Hezekiah is
glorified in a similar manner. Of the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem
and the memorable relief, comparatively little is made (xxxii. 1
seq.; comp. De Wette, i. 75); according to Chronicles, his
master-work is that, as soon as he has mounted the throne, in the
first month of the year, and of his reign (Exodus xl. 2; Leviticus
ix. 1). he institutes by means of the priests and Levites, whom
he addresses quite paternally as his children (xxix. 11), a
great feast of consecration of the temple, alleged to have been
closed and wasted by Ahaz; thereupon in the second month to
celebrate the passover in the most sumptuous manner; and finally,
from the third to the seventh month to concern himself about the
accurate rendering of their dues to the clergy. All is described
in the accustomed style, in the course of three long chapters,
which tell us nothing indeed about the time of Hezekiah, but are
full of information for the period in which the writer lived,
particularly with reference to the method then followed in
offering the sacred dues (xxix. 1-xxxi. 21). In the case of
Josiah also the account of his epoch-making reformation of the
worship is, on the whole, reproduced in Chronicles only in a
mutilated manner, but the short notice of 2Kings xxiii. 21-23
is amplified into a very minute description of a splendid
passover feast, in which, as always, the priests and above all
the Levites figure as the leading personalities. In this last
connection one little trait worth noticing remains, namely, that
the great assembly in which the king causes the Book of the Law
to be sworn to, is, in every other respect, made up in 2Chronicles
xxxiv. 29 seq. exactly as it is in 2Kings xxiii. 1, , except
that instead of "the priests and _prophets_" we find "the priests
and _Levites_." The significance of this is best seen from the
Targum, where "the priests and prophets" are translated into "the
priests and scribes."
By this projection of the legitimate cultus prescribed in the Law
and realised in Judaism, the Chronicler is brought however into a
peculiar conflict with the statements of his authority, which show
that the said cultus was not a mature thing which preceded all
history, but came gradually into being in the course of history;
he makes his escape as well as he can, but yet not without a
strange vacillation between the timeless manner of looking at
things which is natural to him, and the historical tradition
which he uses and appropriates. The verses in 1Kings (xiv. 22, 23):
Judah (not Rehoboam merely) did that which was evil in the sight
of Jehovah and provoked Him to jealousy by their sins which
they sinned, above all that their fathers had done; and they
set up for themselves high places, macceboth and asherim, &c.,
which in the passage where they occur are, like the parallel
statement regarding Israel (xii. 25 seq.), of primary importance,
and cancel by one bold stroke the alleged difference of worship
between the Levitical and non-Levitical kingdom, are omitted as
quite too impossible, although the whole remaining context is
preserved (2Chronicles xii. 1-16). In the same way the
unfavourable judgment upon Rehoboam's successor Abijah (1Kings xv.
3-5) is dropped, because the first kings of Judah, inasmuch as
they maintain the true religion against those of Israel who have
fallen away from it, must of necessity have been good. But
though the Chronicler is silent about what is bad, for the sake of
Judah's honour, he cannot venture to pass over the improvement
which, according to 1Kings xv. 12 seq., was introduced in Asa's
day, although one does not in the least know what need there was
for it, everything already having been in the best possible
state. Nay, he even exaggerates this improvement, and makes of
Asa another Josiah (2Chronicles xv. 1-15), represents him also
(xiv. 3) as abolishing the high places, and yet after all (xv. 1
7) repeats the statement of 1Kings xv. 14 that the high places
were not removed. So also of Jehoshaphat, we are told in the
first place that he walked in the first ways of his father Asa
and abolished the high places in Judah (2Chronicles xvii. 3, 6,
xix. 3), a false generalisation from 1Kings (xxii. 43, 47);
and then afterwards we learn (xx. 32, 33) that the high places
still remained, word for word according to 1Kings xxii. 43, 44.
To thc author it seems on the one hand an impossibility that
the worship of the high places, which in spite of xxxiii.17 is
to him fundamentally idolatry, should not have been repressed
even by pious, i.e., law-observing kings, and yet on the other
hand he mechanically transcribes his copy.
In the case of the notoriously wicked rulers his resort is to make
them simply heathen and persecutors of the covenant religion,
for to him they are inconceivable within the limits of Jehovism,
which always in his view has had the Law for its norm, and is one
and the same with the exclusive Mosaism cf Judaism. So first, in
the case of Joram: he makes high places on the hills of Judah and
seduces the inhabitants of Jerusalem to commit fornication, and
Judah to apostatise (xxi. 11), and moreover slays all his brethren
with the sword (ver. 4)--the one follows from the other. His widow
Athaliah breaks up the house of Jehovah by the hand of her sons
(who had been murdered, but for this purpose are revived), and
makes images of Baal out of the dedicated things (xxiv. 7); none
the less on that account does the public worship of Jehovah go on
uninterrupted under Jehoiada the priest. Most unsparing is the
treatment that Ahaz receives. According to 2Kings xvi. 10 seq.,
be saw at Damascus an altar which took his fancy, and he caused a
similar one to be set up at Jerusalem after its pattern, while
Solomon's brazen altar was probably sent to the melting-pot; it
was Urijah the priest who carried out the orders of the king. One
observes no sign of autonomy, or of the inviolable divine right of
the sanctuary; the king commands and the priest obeys. To the
Chronicler the story so told is quite incomprehensible; what
does he make of it? Ahaz introduced the idolatrous worship of
Damascus, abolished the worship of Jehovah, and shut up the
temple (2Chronicles xxviii. 23 seq.). He regards not the person
of a man, the inflexible unity of the Mosaic cultus is everything
to the Chronicler, and its historical identity would be destroyed
if an orthodox priest, a friend of the prophet Isaiah, had lent a
helping hand to set up a foreign altar. To make idolaters pure
and simple of Manasseh and Amon any heightening of what is said
in 2Kings xxi. was hardly necessary; and besides, there were
here special reasons against drawing the picture in too dark
colours. It is wonderful also to see how the people, which is
always animated with alacrity and zeal for the Law, and rewards
its pious rulers for their fidelity to the covenant (xv. 15,
xvii. 5, xxiv. 10, xxxi. 10), marks its censure of these wicked
kings by withholding from them, or impairing, the honour of royal
burial (xxi. 19, 20, xxviii. 27, xxxiii. 10),--in spite of 2Kings
ix. 28, xvi. 20, xxi. 1 8.
The periodically recurring invasions of heathenism help, at the
same time, to an understanding of the consequent reforms, which
otherwise surpass the comprehension of the Jewish scribe.
According to the Books of Kings, Joash, Hezekiah, and Josiah hit
upon praiseworthy innovations in the temple cultus, set aside
deeply rooted and immemorial customs, and reformed the public
worship of Jehovah. These advances WITHIN Jehovism, which, of
course, are quite incompatible with its Mosaic fixity, are made
by the Chronicler to be simple restorations of the pure religion
following upon its temporary violent suspension. It is in Hezekiah's
case that this is done in the most thoroughgoing manner. After
his predecessor has shut the doors of the house of Jehovah, put out
the lights, and brought the service to an end, he sets all in
operation again by means of the resuscitated priests and Levites;
the first and most important act of his reign is the consecration
of the temple (2Chronicles xxix.), with which is connected
(xxx., xxx).) the restoration of the passover and the restitution
of the temporalia to the clergy, who, as it seems, have hitherto
been deprived of them. That 2Kings xviii. 1-7, although very
different, has supplied the basis for all these extravagances,
is seen by comparing 2Chronicles xxix. 1, 2, xxxi. 1, 20, 21,
xxxii. 22 only, that the king destroyed the brazen serpent
Nehushtan (2Kings xviii. 4) is passed over in silence, as if
it were incredible that such an image should have been worshipped
down to that date in the belief that it had come down from the
time of Moses; the not less offensive statement, on the other
hand, that he took away _the Asherah_ (by which only that of
the temple altar can be understood; comp. Deuteronomy xvi. 21)
is got over by charging the singular into the plural; he took
away _the Asherahs_ (xxx). 1 ), which occurred here and there
throughout Judah, of course at heathen altars.
In the cases of Joash and Josiah the free flight of the
Chronicler's law-crazed fancy is hampered by the copy to which
he is tied, and which gives not the results merely, but the
details of the proceedings themselves (2Chronicles xxii., xxiii.;
2Kings xi., xii.). It is precisely such histories as these,
almost the only circumstantially told ones relating to Judah
in the Book of Kings, which though in their nature most akin
to our author's preference for cultus, bring him into the greatest
embarrassment, by introducing details which to his notions are
wholly against the Law, and yet must not be represented otherwise
than in the most favourable light.
It cannot be doubted that the sections about Joash in 2Kings
(xi. 1-xii. 17 [16]), having their scene end subject laid in the
temple, are at bottom identical with 2Chronicles xxii. 10-xxiv.
14. In the case of 2Kings xi., to begin with, the beginning and
the close, vers. 1-3, vers. 13-20, recur verbatim in 2Chronicles
xxii. 10-12, xxiii. 12-21, if trifling alterations be left
out of account. But in the central portion also there occur
passages which are taken over into 2Chronicles without any
change. Only here they are inappropriate, while in the original
connection they are intelligible. For the meaning and colour of
the whole is entirely altered in Chronicles, as the following
comparison in the main passage will show; to understand it one
must bear in mind that the regent Athaliah has put to death all
the members of the house of David who had escaped the massacre of
Jehu, with the exception of the child Joash, who, with the
knowledge of Jehoiada, the priest, has found hiding and protection
in the temple.
2 KINGS xi 2CHRONICLES xxiii.
4. In the seventh year Jehoiada 1. _In the seventh year Jehoiada_
sent and took the captains of sent and took the captains of
the Carians and runners, strengthened himself and _took the
captains_, Azariah the son of Jeroham,
and Ishmael the son of Jehohanan,
and Azariah the son of Obed,
and Maaseiah the son of Adaiah,
and Elishaphat the son of Zichri,
into covenant with him.
2. And they went about in Judah
and gathered the Levites out of
all the cities in Judah, and the
chiefs of the fathers of Israel,
and they came to Jerusalem.
and brought them to him into 3. And the whole congregation
the house of Jehovah, and made a made _a covenant in the house of
covenant with them, and took God_ with the king. And he said
an oath of them in the house of unto them, _Behold, the king's
Jehovah, and showed them the son_ shall reign, as Jehovah said
king's son; concerning the sons of David.
5. And commanded them, saying, 4. _This is the thing that ye shall
This is the thing that ye shall do: the third part of you, which
do; the third part of you which enter on the Sabbath_, of the
enter on the Sabbath and keep the priests and of the Levites,
watch of the king's house, shall keep the doors.
[6. And the third part in the 5. And the third part of you shall
gate of Jesod, and the third be _in the house of the king_, and
part in the gate behind the the third part in the gate Jesod; and
runners, and ye shall keep all the people shall be in the courts
the watch in the house...]: of the house of Jehovah.
7. And the two other third
parts of you, those who go 6. And no one shall come into the
forth on the Sabbath and house of Jehovah save the priests
keep the watch in the house and they of the Levites that minister;
of Jehovah about the king. but all the people shall keep the
ordinance of Jehovah.
8. Ye shall encompass the king 7. And the Levites shall _compass
round about, every man with the king round about, every man
his weapons in his hand, with his weapons in his hands, and
and whosoever cometh within whosoever cometh_ into the house,
the ranks, shall be put to _shall be put to death; and they shall
death, and ye shall be with be with the king whithersoever he
the king whithersoever he goeth. goeth._
9. And the captains did according 8. And the Levites and all Judah
to all that Jehoiada the priest _did according to all that Jehoiada
had commanded, and took each his the priest had commanded, and took
men, those that were to come in each his men, those that were to come
on the Sabbath with those that in on the Sabbath with those that
were to go out on the Sabbath, were to go out on the Sabbath_, for
and came to Jehoiada the priest. Jehoiada the priest dismissed not
the divisions.
10. And to the captains the 9. And Jehoiada the priest delivered
priest gave King David's to the captains of hundreds the spears
spears and shields that were and the bucklers and the shields that
in the house of Jehovah. King David had, which were in the
house of God.
11. And the runners stood, every 10. And he set all the people, _every
man with his weapons in his hand, man having his weapon in his hand,
from the south side of the house from the south side of the house to
to the north side, along by the north side, along by the altar
the altar and the house, and the house, round about the king_.
round about the king.
12. And he brought forth the 11. _And they brought out the king's
king's son and put upon him son and put upon him the crown and
the crown and the bracelet, the bracelet and they made him king_,
and they made him king and and Jehoiada and his sons _anointed
anointed him, and they clapped him and said:
their hands and said: Long live the king_.
Long live the king.
Can the enthronement of Joash, as on a former occasion that of
Solomon, possibly have been accomplished by the agency of the
bodyguard of the kings of Judah? Is it possible that the high
priest should have made a covenant with the captains within the
house of Jehovah, and himself have held out the inducement to
those half-pagan mercenaries to penetrate into the temple
precincts? That were indeed an outrage upon the Law not lightly
to be imputed to so holy a man! Why then did not Jehoiada make
use of his own guard, the myriads of Levites who were at his
command? Such a course was the only right one, and therefore
that which was followed. "No one shall come into the house of
Jehovah save the priests and they of the Levites that minister:"
in accordance with this fundamental principle stated by himself
(xxiii. 6; comp ver. 7 INTO THE HOUSE instead of WITHIN THE RANKS),
our pious historian substitutes his priests and Levites for the
Carians and runners. Hereby also Jehoiada comes into the place
that belongs to him as sovereign of the sanctuary and of the
congregation. He therefore needs no longer to set on foot in
secret a conspiracy with the chiefs of the body-guard, but
through his own spiritual officers calls together the Levites and
heads of houses from all the cities of Judah into the temple,
and causes the whole assemblage there to enter into a covenant
with the young king. The glaring inconsistencies inevitably
produced by the new colouring thus given to individual parts of
the old picture must simply be taken as part of the bargain.
If Jehoiada has unrestricted sway over such a force and sets
about his revolution with the utmost publicity, then it is he
and not Athaliah who has the substance of power; why then all
this trouble about the deposition of the tyrant? Out of mere
delight in Levitical pomp and high solemnities? What moreover
is to be done with the captains who are retained in xxiii. 1, 9,
and in ver. 14 are even called officers of the host as in 2Kings
xi 15, after their soldiers have been taken from them or
metamorphosed? Had the Levites a military organisation, and,
divided into three companies, did they change places every
week in the temple service? The commentators are inclined to call
in to their aid such inventive assumptions, with which, however,
they may go on for ever without attaining their end, for the error
multiplies itself. As a specially striking instance of the manner
in which the procedure of Chronicles avenges itself may be mentioned
chapter xxiii. 8: "and they took each his men," &c. The words are
taken from 2Kings xi. 9, but there refer to the captains, while
here the antecedents are the Levites and all the men of Judah--as
if each one of these last had a company of his own which entered
upon service, or left it, every Sabbath day.
The comparison of 2Chronicles xxiv. 4-14 with 2Kings xii. 5-17
[4-16] is not much less instructive. According to 2Kings xii.
Joash enjoined that all the money dues payable to the temple
should in future fall to the priests, who in turn were to be under
obligation to maintain the building in good repair. But they took
the money and neglected the other side of the bargain, and when
they and Jehoiada in particular were blamed by the king on that
account, they gave up the dues so as not to be liable to the
burden. Thereupon the king set up a kind of sacred treasury, a
chest with a hole in the lid, near the altar, "on the right hand
as one goes into the temple," into which the priests were to cast
the money which came in, with the exception of the sin and
trespass moneys, which still belonged to them. And as often as
the chest became full, the king's scribes and the chief priest
removed the money, weighed it, and handed it over to the
contractors for payment of the workmen; that none of it was to be
employed for sacred vessels is expressly said (ver. 14). This
arrangement by King Joash was a lasting one, and still subsisted
in Josiah's time (2Kings . . xxii. 3 seq.).
The arbitrary proceeding of Joash did not well suit the ideas of
an autonomous hierocracy. According to the Law the current money
dues fell to the priests; no king had the right to take them away
and dispose of them at his pleasure. How was it possible that
Jehoiada should waive his divine right and suffer such a
sacrilegious invasion of sacred privileges? how was it possible
that he should be blamed for his (at first) passive resistance of
the illegal invasion; how was it possible at all that the priest
in his own proper department should be called to account by the
king? Chronicles knows better than that. The wicked Athaliah had
wasted and plundered the temple; Joash determined to restore it,
and for this purpose to cause money to be collected throughout
all Israel by the agency of the Levites. But as these last were
in no hurry, he made a chest and set it outside in the doorway of
the sanctuary; there the people streamed past, and gentle and simple
with joyful heart cast in their gifts until the chest was full.
This being announced by the keepers of the door, the king's scribe
and the delegate of the high priest came to remove the money;
with it the king and the high priest paid the workmen, and what
remained over was made into costly vessels (2Chronicles xxiv. 5-14).
According to this account Joash makes no arrangement whatever
about the sacred dues, but sets on foot an extraordinary collection,
as had once been done by Moses for the building of the tabernacle
(xxiv. 6, 9); following upon this, everything else also which in
2Kings xii. is a permanent arrangement, here figures as an isolated
occurrence; instead of necessary repairs of the temple constantly
recurring, only one extraordinary restoration of it is mentioned,
and for this occasional purpose only is the treasure chest set up,--
not, however, beside the altar, but only at the doorway (xxiv. 8;
comp. 2Kings xii. 10). The clergy, the Levites, are charged
only with making the collection, not with maintaining the building
out of the sacred revenues; consequently they are not
reproached with keeping the money to themselves, but only with
not being heartily enough disposed towards the collection. It
appears, however, that they were perfectly justified in this
backwardness, for the king has only to set up the "treasury of
God," when forthwith it overflows with the voluntary offerings of
the people who flock to it, so that out of the proceeds something
remains over (ver. 14) for certain other purposes--which according
to 2Kings xii. 14 [13] were expressly excluded. Joash imposes
no demands at all upon the priests, and Jehoiada in particular
stands over against him as invested with perfectly equal rights;
if the king sends his scribe, the high priest also does not appear
personally, but causes himself to be represented by a delegate
(xxiv. 11; comp. 2Kings xii. 11 [10]). Here also many a new piece
does not come well into the old garment, as De Wette (i. 10O) shows.
Chronicles itself tacitly gives the honour to the older narrative
by making Joash at last apostatise from Mosaism and refuse the
grateful deference which he owed to the high priest; this is the
consequence of the unpleasant impression, derived not from its
own story, but from that of the Book of Kings, with regard to the
undue interference of the otherwise pious king in the affairs of
the sanctuary and of the priests.
Chronicles reaps the fruits of its perversion of 2Kings xii. in
its reproduction of the nearly related and closely connected
section 2Kings xxii. 3-IO. It is worth while once more to bring
the passages together.
2Kings xxii. 2Chronicles xxxiv.
3. And in the eighteenth year 8. And in the eighteenth year
of king Josiah the king sent of his reign, to cleanse the
Shaphan the son of Azaliah, land and the house, he sent
the son of Meshullam, the scribe, Shaphan the son of Azaliah,
to the house of Jehovah, saying, and Maaseiah the governor of
the city, and Joah the son of
4. Go up to Hilkiah the high Joahaz the recorder, to repair
priest, that he may empty the the house of Jehovah his God.
money which hath been brought
into the house of Jehovah 9. And they came to Hilkiah
which the keepers of the the high priest, and they
threshold have gathered of delivered the money that had
the people. been brought into the house
of God which the Levites that
5. And let them deliver it into kept the threshold had gathered
the hand of the doers of the from Ephraim and Manasseh and
work that have the oversight all the remnant of Israel and
of the house of Jehovah, and from all Judah and Benjamin,
let them give it to the doers and had returned therewith
of the work who are in the to Jerusalem.
house of Jehovah to repair
the breaches of the house. 10. And they gave it into the
hand of the workmen that had the
6. Unto carpenters, and builders, oversight of the house of Jehovah,
and masons, and to buy timber and of the workmen that wrought in
and hewn stones to repair the the house of Jehovah to repair
house. and amend the house.
7. But let no reckoning be 11. They gave it to the artificers
made with them as to the money and to the builders to buy
that is delivered into their hewn stone and timber for roofs
hand, because they deal faithfully. and beams of the houses which
the kings of Judah had destroyed.
12. And the men did the work
faithfully. And the overseers of
them were Jahath and Obadiah,
the Levites, of the sons of
Merari; and Zechariah and
Meshullam, of the Kohathites,
to preside; and all the Levites
that had skill in instruments
of music
13. Were over the bearers of
burdens and overseers of all
that wrought the work in any
manner of service; and others
of the Levites were scribes
and officers and porters.
14. And when they brought out
the money that had been brought
into the house of Jehovah,
Hilkiah the priest found the book
of the law of Jehovah by the hand
of Moses.
8. And Hilkiah the high priest 15. And Hilkiah answered and
said unto Shaphan the scribe: said to Shaphan the scribe:
I have found the book of the I have found the book of the law
law in the house of Jehovah. in the house of Jehovah. And
And Hilkiah gave the book to Hilkiah delivered the book
Shaphan, and he read it. to Shaphan.
9. And Shaphan the scribe came 16. And Shaphan carried the book
to the king and brought the king to the king, and besides brought
word again, and said: Thy word back to the king, saying:
servants have emptied out the All that was committed to thy
money that was found in the servants they are doing.
house and have delivered it
into the hand of them that 17. And they have emptied out
do the work, that have the the money that was found in the
oversight of the house of house of Jehovah, and have
Jehovah. delivered it into the hand
of the overseers and into
10. And Shaphan the scribe the hand of the workmen.
told the king, saying: Hilkiah
the priest hath delivered 18. And Shaphan the scribe
to me a book. And Shaphan told the king, saying: Hilkiah
read it before the king. the priest hath given me a book.
And Shaphan read out of it
before the king.
The occasion on which the priest introduces the Book of the Law
to the notice of Shaphan has presuppositions in the arrangement
made by Joash which Chronicles has destroyed, substituting others
in its place,--that the temple had been destroyed under the
predecessors of Josiah, but that under the latter money was raised
by the agency of peripatetic Levites throughout all Israel for the
restoration, and in the first instance deposited in the treasure-chest.
At the emptying of this chest the priest is then alleged to have
found the book (ver. 14, after Deuteronomy xxxi. 26), notwithstanding
that on this occasion Shaphan also and the two accountants added
in ver. 8 were present, and ought therefore to have had a share
in the discovery which, however, is excluded by ver. 15 (= 2Kings
xxii. 8). There are other misunderstandings besides; in particular,
the superintendents of the works (_muphkadim_), to whom, according
to the original narrative, the money is handed over for payment,
are degraded to the rank of simple workmen, from whom, nevertheless,
they are again afterwards distinguished; and while in 2Kings xxii.
7 they are represented as dealing faithfully _in paying out the money_,
in 2Chronicles xxxiv. 12 they deal faithfully in their work.
Perhaps, however, this is no mere misunderstanding, but is
connected with the endeavour to keep profane hands as far off as
possible from that which is holy, and, in particular, to give the
management of the work to the Levites (vers. 12,13). To what
length the anxiety of later ages went in this matter is seen in
the statement of Josephus (Ant., xv. 11, 2), that Herod caused one
thousand priests to be trained as masons and carpenters for the
building of his temple. The two most interesting alterations in
Chronicles are easily overlooked. In ver. 1 8 the words: "He
read the book to the king," are changed into "He read out of the
book to the king;" and after "Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan"
(ver. 15) the words "and he read it" are omitted. In 2Kings the
book appears as of very moderate size, but the author of
Chronicles figures to himself the whole Pentateuch under that
name.
In the sequel 2Kings xxii. 11-xxiii.3 is indeed repeated verbatim
in 2Chronicles xxxiv. 19-32, but the incomparably more important
section connected with it (xxiii. 4-10), giving a detailed
account of Josiah's vigorous reformation, is omitted, and its
place taken by the meagre remark that the king removed all
abominations out of Israel (xxxiv. 33); in compensation his
passover feast is described all the more fully (chap. xxxv.).
In recording also the finding and publication of the Law,
Chronicles fails to realise that this document begins now for the
first time to be historically operative, and acquires its great
importance quite suddenly. On the contrary, it had been from the
days of Moses the basis on which the community rested, and had
been in force and validity at all normal times; only
temporarily could this life-principle of the theocracy be
repressed by wicked kings, forthwith to become vigorous and
active again as soon as the pressure was removed. As soon as Ahaz
has closed his eyes, Hezekiah, in the first month of his first
year, again restores the Mosaic cultus; and as soon as Josiah
reaches years of discretion he makes good the sins of his fathers.
Being at his accession still too young, the eighth year of his
reign is, as a tribute to propriety, selected instead of the
eighth year of his life, and the great reformation assigned
to that period which in point of fact he undertook at a much
later date (xxxiv. 3-7 = 2Kings xxiii. 4-20> Thus the movement
happily becomes separated from its historical occasion, and
in character the innovation appears rather as a simple recovery
of the spring after the pressure on it has been removed. The mist
disappears before the sun of the Law, which appears in its old
strength; its light passes through no phases, but shines from
the beginning with uniform brightness. What Josiah did had also
been done before him already by Asa, then by Jehoshaphat, then
by Hezekiah; the reforms are not steps in a progressive development,
but have all the same unchanging contents. Such is the influence
upon historical vision of that transcendental Mosaism raised far
above all growth and process of becoming, which can be traced even
in the Book of Kings, but is so much more palpable in the Book
of Chronicles.
VI.II.3. Apart from the fact that it represents the abiding tradition
of the legitimate cultus at Jerusalem, the history of Judah in the
Book of Chronicles has yet another instructive purpose. In the
kingdom of Judah it is not a natural and human, but a divine
pragmatism that is operative. To give expression to this is what
the prophets exist for in unbroken succession side by side with
high priests and kings; they connect the deeds of men with the
events of the course of the world, and utilise the sacred history
as a theme for their preaching, as a collection of examples
illustrative of the promptest operation of the righteousness of
Jehovah. In doing so they do not preach what is new or free, but
have at their command, like Jehovah Himself, only the Law of
Moses, setting before their hearers prosperity and adversity in
conformity with the stencil pattern, just as the law is
faithfully fulfilled or neglected. Of course their prophecies
always come exactly true, and in this way is seen an astonishing
harmony between inward worth and outward circumstance. Never
does sin miss its punishment, and never where misfortune occurs is
guilt wanting.
In the fifth year of Rehoboam Judah and Jerusalem were ravaged by
Pharaoh Shishak (1Kings xiv. 25). The explanation is that three
years they walked in the ways of David and Solomon, because for
three years they were strengthened and reinforced by the priests
and Levites and other pious persons who had immigrated from the
northern kingdom (2Chronicles xi. 17); but thereafter in the fourth
year, after the kingdom of Rehoboam had been strengthened and
confirmed, he forsook the Law and all Israel with him (xii. 1)--
and in the fifth year followed the invasion of Shishak. A prophet
announces this, and in consequence the king humbles himself
along with his people and escapes with comparatively trifling
punishment, being thought worthy to reign yet other twelve years.
Asa in his old age was diseased in his feet (1Kings xv. 23).
According to 2Chronicles xvi. 12, he died of this illness, which is
described as extremely dangerous, in the forty-first year of his
reign, after having already been otherwise unfortunate in his
later years. And why? He had invoked foreign aid, instead of
the divine, against Baasha of Israel. Now, as Baasha survived only
to the twenty-sixth year of Asa, the wickedness must have been
perpetrated before that date. But in that case its connection
with the punishment which overtook the king only towards the
close of his life would not be clear. Baasha's expedition against
Jerusalem, accordingly, and the Syrian invasion of Israel
occasioned by Asa on that account are brought down in Chronicles
to the thirty-sixth year of the latter (xvi. 1). It has been
properly observed that Baasha was at that date long dead, and the
proposal has accordingly been made to change the number
thirty-six into sixteen,--without considering that the first half
of the reign of Asa is expressly characterised as having been
prosperous, that the thirty-fifth year is already reached in
chap. xv. 19, and that the correction destroys the connection of
the passage with what follows (xvi. 7 seq.). For it is in
connection with that flagitious appeal for aid to the Syrians that
the usual prophet makes his appearance (xvi. 7), and makes the
usual announcement of impending punishment. It is Hanani, a man
of Northern Israel (1Kings xvi. 7), but Asa treats him as if he
were one of his own subjects, handles him severely, and shuts him
in prison. By this he hastens and increases his punishment,
under which he falls in the forty-first year of his reign.
Jehoshaphat, the pious king, according to 1Kings xxii., took part
in the expedition of the godless Ahab of Israel against the
Damascenes. Chronicles cannot allow this to pass unrebuked,
and accordingly when the king returns in peace, the same Hanani
announces his punishment, albeit a gracious one (2Chronicles xix.
I-3). And gracious indeed it is; the Moabites and Ammonites
invade the land, but Jehoshaphat without any effort on his part
wins a glorious victory, and inexhaustible plunder (xx. 1 seq.).
One cannot blame him, therefore, for once more entering into an
alliance with Ahab's successor for a naval expedition to be
undertaken in common, which is to sail from a port of the Red Sea,
probably round Africa, to Tarshish (Spain, 2Chronicles ix. 21).
But this time he is punished more seriously as Eliezer the son of
Dodavah had prophesied, the ships are wrecked. Compare on the
other hand 1Kings xxii. 48, 49:
"Jehoshaphat made ships of Tarshish to go to Ophir for gold,
but they went not, for the ships were wrecked in the harbour
on the Red Sea. At that time Ahaziah the son of Ahab had said
to Jehoshaphat: Let my servants go with thy servants in the ships;
but Jehoshaphat would not."
So the original statement. But in Chronicles a moral ground must
be found for the misfortune, and Jehoshaphat therefore makes with
the king of Samaria a sinful alliance, which in point of fact he
had declined, not indeed from religious motives.
Joram, the son of Jehoshaphat, conducted himself very ill, it is
said in 2Kings viii. 18; Chronicles enhances his offence, and
above all adds the merited reward (xxi. 4, seq.). Elijah,
although he had quitted this earth long before (2Kings iii. 11
seq.), must write to the offender a letter, the threats of which
are duly put into execution by Jehovah. The Philistines and
Arabians having previously pressed him hard, he falls into an
incurable sickness of the bowels, which afflicts him for years,
and finally brings him to his end in a most frightful manner
(xxi. 12, seq.). In concurrence with the judgment of God, the
people withhold from the dead king the honours of royalty, and he
is not buried beside his fathers, notwithstanding 2Kings viii. 24.
Joash, according to 2Kings xii., was a pious ruler, but met with
misfortune; he was compelled to buy off Hazael, who had laid
siege to Jerusalem, at a heavy price, and finally he died by
the assassin's hand. Chronicles is able to tell how he deserved
this fate. In the sentence: "He did what was right in the sight
of the Lord all his days, because Jehoiada the high priest had
instructed him " (2Kings xii. 3 [2]), it alters the last
expression into "all the days of Jehoiada the priest," (xxiv. 2).
After the death of his benefactor he fell away, and showed his
family the basest ingratitude; at the end of that very year the
Syrians invade him; after their departure his misfortunes are
increased by a dreadful illness, under which he is murdered
(xxiv. 17 seq.).
Amaziah was defeated, made prisoner, and severely punished by
Jehoash, king of Samaria, whom he had audaciously challenged
(2Kings xiv. 8 seq.). Why? because he had set up in Jerusalem
idols which had been carried off from Edom, and served them
(2Chronicles xxv. 1 4). He prefers the plundered gods of a
vanquished people to Jehovah at the very moment when the latter
has proved victorious over them! From the time of this apostasy--
a crime for which no punishment could be too great--his own servants
are also stated to have conspired against him and put him to death
(xxv. 27), and yet we are assured in ver. 25 (after 2Kings xiv.
I;) that Amaziah survived his adversary by fifteen years.
Uzziah, one of the best kings of Judah, became a leper, and was
compelled to hand over the regency to his son Jotham (2Kings xv.
5); for, adds Chronicles, "when he had become strong, his heart
was lifted up, even to ruin, so that he transgressed against
Jehovah his God, and went into the temple of Jehovah, to burn
incense upon the altar of incense. And Azariah the priest went in
after him, and with him fourscore priests of Jehovah, and
withstood him and said: It is not for thee to burn incense, but
only for the sons of Aaron who are consecrated thereto. Then
Uzziah was wroth and laid not the censer aside, and the leprosy
rose up in his forehead, and the priests thrust him out from
thence" (xxvi. 16-20). The matter is now no longer a mystery.
Ahaz was a king of little worth, and yet he got fairly well out
of the difficulty into which the invasion of the allied Syrians
and Israelites had brought him by making his kingdom tributary
to the Assyrian Tiglath-Pileser (2Kings xvi. 1 seq.). But
Chronicles could not possibly let him off so cheaply. By it he
is delivered into the hand of the enemy: the Israelites alone
slaughter 120,000 men of Judah, including the king's son and his
most prominent servants, and carry off to Samaria 200,000 women
and children, along with a large quantity of other booty. The
Edomites and Philistines also fall upon Ahaz, while the Assyrians
whom he has summoned to his aid misunderstand him, and come up
against Jerusalem with hostile intent; they do not, indeed, carry
the city, but yet become possessors, without trouble, of its
treasures, which the king himself hands over to them (xxviii. 1-21).
The Book of Kings knows no worse ruler than Manasseh was; yet he
reigned undisturbed for fifty-five years--a longer period than was
enjoyed by any other king (2Kings xxi.1-18). This is a stone
of stumbling that Chronicles must remove. It tells that Manasseh
was carried in chains by the Assyrians to Babylon, but there prayed
to Jehovah, who restored him to his kingdom; he then abolished
idolatry in Judah (xxxiii. 11-20). Thus on the one hand he does
not escape punishment, while on the other hand the length of his
reign is nevertheless explained. Recently indeed it has been
sought to support the credibility of these statements by means of
an Assyrian inscription, from which it appears that Manasseh did
pay tribute to Esarhaddon. That is to say, he had been
overpowered by the Assyrians; that is again to say, that he had
been thrown into chains and carried off by them. Not so rapid,
but perhaps quite as accurate, would be the inference that as a
tributary prince he must have kept his seat on the throne of Judah,
and not have exchanged it for the prison of Babylon. In truth,
Manasseh's temporary deposition is entirely on the same plane
with Nebuchadnezzar's temporary grass-eating. The unhistorical
character of the intermezzo (the motives of which are perfectly
transparent) follows not only from the silence of the Book of
Kings (a circumstance of no small importance indeed), but also,
for example, from Jeremiah xv. 4; for when it is there said that
all Judah and Jerusalem are to be given up to destruction because
of Manasseh, it is not presupposed that his guilt has been already
borne and atoned for by himself.
To justify the fact of Josiah's defeat and death at Megiddo, there
is attached to him the blame of not having given heed to the words
of Necho from the mouth of God warning him against the struggle
(xxxv. 21, 22). Contrariwise, the punishment of the godless
Jehoiakim is magnified; he is stated to have been put in irons by
the Chaldaeans and carried to Babylon (xxxvi. 6)--an impossibility
of course before the capture of Jerusalem, which did not take place
until the third month of his successor. The last prince of
David's house, Zedekiah, having suffered more severely than all
his predecessors, must therefore have been stiff-necked and
rebellious (xxxvi.12, 13),--characteristics to which, according to
the authentic evidence of the prophet Jeremiah, he had in reality
the least possible claim.
It is thus apparent how inventions of the most circumstantial kind
have arisen out of this plan of writing history, as it is
euphemistically called. One is hardly warranted, therefore, in
taking the definiteness of statements vouched for by Chronicles
alone as proof of their accuracy. The story about Zerah the
Ethiopian (2Chronicles xiv. 9 seq.) is just as apocryphal as that
of Chushan-Rishathaim (Judges iii 10). Des Vignoles has indeed
identified the first-named with the Osorthon of Manetho, who again
occurs in the Egyptian monuments as Osorkon, son of Shishak, though
not as renewing the war against Palestine; but Osorkon was an Egyptian,
Zerah an Ethiopian, and the resemblance of the names is after all
not too obvious. But, even if Zerah were really a historical
personage, of what avail would this be for the unhistorical
connection? With a million of men the king of the Libyans and
Moors, stepping over Egypt, comes against Judah. Asa, ruler of a
land of about sixty German square miles, goes to meet the enemy
with 580,000, and defeats him on the plain to the north of Mareshah
so effectually that not a single soul survives. Shall it be said
that this story, on account of the accurate statement of locality
(although Mareshah instead of Gath is not after all suggestive of
an old source), is credible-at all events after deduction of the
incredibilities? If the incredibilities are deducted, nothing at
all is left. The invasion of Judah by Baasha of Israel, and Asa's
deportment towards him (1Kings xv. 17 seq.), are quite enough
fully to dispose of the great previous victory over the
Ethiopians claimed for Asa. The case is no better with the victory
of Jehoshaphat over the Ammonites and Moabites (2Chronicles xx.);
here we have probably an echo of 2Kings iii., where we read of
Jehoshaphat's taking part in a campaign against Moab, and where
also recurs that characteristic feature of the self-destruction of
the enemy, so that for the opposing force nothing remains but the
work of collecting the booty (iii. 23; compare 2Chronicles xx.
23). The Chronicler has enemies always at his command when
needed,--Arabians, Ethiopians (xvii. 11, xxi. 16, xxii. 1, xxvi.
7), Mehunims (xx. 1, xxvi. 1), Philistines (xvii. 11, xxi. 16,
xxvi. 6 seq., xxviii. 18), Ammonites (xx. 1, xxvi. 8, xxvii. 5),
whose very names in some cases put them out of the question
for the older time. Such statements as that the Ammonites became
subject to Kings Uzziah and Jotham, are, in the perfect silence of
the credible sources, condemned by their inherent impossibility;
for at that period the highway to Ammon was Moab, and this country
was by no means then in the possession of Judah, nor is it
anywhere said that it was. The Philistines as vindictive enemies
are rendered necessary by the plan of the history (xxi. 16,
xxviii. 18), and this of itself throws suspicion upon the previous
statements (xvii. 11, xxvi. 6 seq.) that they were laid under
tribute by Jehoshaphat, and subjugated by Uzziah; it is utterly
impossible to believe that the latter should have broken down
the walls of Ashdod (Amos i. 7), or have established fortresses
in Philistia. According to the Book of Kings, he did indeed conquer
Edom anew; Edom is according to this authority the one land to
which the descendants of David lay claim and against which they
wage war, while Moab and Philistia (the most important towns being
excepted, however, in the case of the latter) virtually belong to
the territory of Ephraim.
The triumphs given by the Chronicler to his favourites have none
of them any historical effect, but merely serve to add a
momentary splendour to their reigns. Merit is always the obverse
of success. Joram, Joash, Ahaz, who are all depicted as
reprobates, build no fortresses, command no great armies, have no
wealth of wives and children; it is only in the case of the
pious kings (to the number of whom even Rehoboam and Abijah also
belong) that the blessing of God manifests itself by such tokens.
Power is the index of piety, with which accordingly It rises and
fall. Apart from this it is of no consequence if, for example,
Jehoshaphat possesses more than 1,100.000 soldiers (xvii, 14
seq.), for they are not used for purposes of war; the victory
comes from God and from the music of the Levites (chap. xx.).
In the statements about fortress-building which regularly recur
in connection with the names of good rulers, /1/
****************************************
1 viii. 3-6, xi. 5-12, xiii. 19, xiv. 5, 6 [6, 7], xvii. 12,
xix. 5, xxvi. 9, 10, xxvii. 4, xxxii. 5,, xxxiii. 14.
***************************************
general statements, such as those of Hosea viii. 14, 2Kings
xviii. 13, are illustrated by concrete examples, a few elements
of tradition being also employed (Lachish). It is not possible,
but, indeed, neither is it necessary, to demonstrate in every case
the imaginary character of the statements; according to xix. 5
it would appear as if simply every city of any kind of
consequence was regarded as a fortress and in the list given in
chap. xi. 6 seq., we chiefly meet with names which were also
familiar in the post-exile period. That Abijah deprived Jeroboam
of Bethel amongst others, and that Jehoshaphat set governors over
the Ephraimite cities which had been taken by Asa his father
(xiii. 19, xvii. 2), would excite surprise if it stood anywhere
else than in Chronicles. In forming a judgment on its family
history of the descendants of David, the statement contained in
xiii. 21 is specially helpful both in manner and substance: "And
Abijah waxed mighty, and he married fourteen wives, and begat
twenty and two sons, and sixteen daughters." This can only be
taken as referring to the reign of Abijah, and that too after the
alleged victory over Jeroboam; but he reigned altogether for only
three years, and is it to be supposed that within this interval
one of his sons should even have attained to man's estate?
In reality, however, Abijah had no son at all, but was succeeded
by his brother, for the definite and doubtless authentic
statement that Maachah, the wife of Rehoboam, was the mother
both of Abijah and of Asa, and that the latter removed her from
her position at court (1Kings xv. 2, 10, 13), must override
the allegation of ver. 8, that the successor of Abijah was his
son. After Jehoshaphat's death it is said in the first place
that Jehoram slew all his brethren (2 Chr. xxi. 4), and
afterwards that the Arabians slew all Jehoram's children
with the exception of one (xxii. 1); how many of the Davidic
house in that case survive for Jehu, who nevertheless slew
forty-two of them (2Kings x. 14)? In short, the family
history of the house of David is of equal historical value with
all the other matters on which the Chronicler is more widely and
better informed than all the older canonical books. The remark
applies to names and numbers as well; about such trifles, which
produce an appearance of accuracy, the author is never in any
embarrassment.
VI.II.4. The Book of Kings then everywhere crops up as the real
foundation of the portion of Chronicles relating to Judah after
the period of Solomon. Where the narrative of the former is
detailed and minute, our author also has fuller and more
interesting material at his command; so, for example, in the
history relating to the temple and to the common and mutual
relations of Judah and Israel (2 Chr. x., xviii., xxiii., seq.,
xxv. 17-24, xxxiii. seq.). Elsewhere he is restricted to the
epitome that constitutes the framework of the Book of Kings; by
it he is guided in his verdicts as to the general character of the
successive sovereigns as well as in his chronological statements,
although, in accordance with his plan, he as a rule omits the
synchronisms (xiii. 1, xxv. 25). The positive data also, given by
the epitome with reference to the legislation in matters of
worship by the various kings, are for the most part reproduced
word for word, and float in a fragmentary and readily
distinguishable way in the mixture of festivals, sermons,
choruses, law, and prophets. For this is an important
verification of all the results already obtained; all in
Chronicles that is not derived from Samuel and Kings, has a
uniform character not only in its substance, but also in its
awkward and frequently unintelligible language--plainly belonging
to a time in which Hebrew was approaching extinction--in its
artificiality of style, deriving its vitality exclusively
from Biblical reminiscences. This is not the place for the
proof of these points, but the reader may compare Staehelin's
Einleitung (1862), p. 139 seq.; Bertheau, p. xiv. seq., and
Graf, p. 116.
VI.III.
VI.III.1. When the narrative of Chronicles runs parallel with the
older historical books of the canon, it makes no real additions, but
the tradition is merely differently coloured, under the influence
of contemporary motives. In the picture it gives the writer's own
present is reflected, not antiquity. But neither is the case very
different with the genealogical lists prefixed by way of
introduction in 1Chronicles i.-ix.; they also are in the main valid
only for the period at which they were drawn up--whether for its
actual condition or for its conceptions of the past.
The penchant for pedigrees and genealogical registers, made up from
a mixture of genealogico-historical and ethnologico-statistical
elements, is a characteristic feature of Judaism; along with the
thing the word YX# also first came into use during the later
times. Compendious histories are written in the form of TLDWT and
YWX#YN. The thread is thin and inconspicuous, and yet apparently
strong and coherent; one does not commit oneself to much, and yet
has opportunity to introduce all kinds of interesting matter.
Material comes to one's hand, given a beginning and an end, the
bridge is soon completed. Another expression of the same tendency
is the inclination to give a genealogical expression to all
connections and associations of human society whatsoever, to
create artificial families on all hands and bring them into blood
relationship, as if the whole of public life resolved itself into
a matter of cousinship,--an inclination indicative of the times of
political stagnation then prevalent. We hear of the families of
the scribes at Jabesh, of the potters and gardeners and
byssus-workers, of the sons of the goldsmiths, apothecaries, and
fullers, these corporations being placed on the same plane with
actual families. The division into classes of the persons engaged
in religious service is merely the most logical development of
this artificial system which is applied to all other social
relations as well.
Proceeding now to a fuller examination of the contents of 1 Chron
i.-ix. and other texts connected with that, we have here, apart
from the first chapter, which does not demand further attention,
an ethno-genealogical survey of the twelve tribes of Israel, which
is based mostly on the data of the Priestly Code (Genesis xlvi.;
um. xxvi.), expanded now more now less. But while the statements
of the Priestly Code have to hold good for the Mosaic period only,
those of Chronicles have also to apply to the succeeding
ages,--those, for example, of Saul and David, of Tiglath-Pileser and
Hezekiah. As early as the time of the judges, however, very
important changes had taken place in the conditions. While Dan
continued to subsist with difficulty, Simeon and Levi had been
completely broken up (Genesis xlix. 7); in the Blessing of Moses
the latter name denotes something quite different from a tribe, and
the former is not even so much as named, although the enumeration
is supposed to be complete; in David's time it had already been
absorbed by families of mingled Judaic and Edomitic descent in the
district where it had once had independent footing. Eastward of
Jordan Leah's first-born had a similar fate, although somewhat
later. After it has been deposed from its primacy in Genesis xlix.
and twitted in Judges v. with its brave words unaccompanied by
corresponding deeds, the faint and desponding wish is expressed in
Deuteronomy xxxiii. 6 that "Reuben may live and not die," and King
Mesha is unaware that any other than the Gadite had ever dwelt in
the land which, properly speaking, was the heritage of Reuben.
But in Chronicles these extinct tribes again come to life--and not
Levi alone, which is a special case, but also Simeon and Reuben,
with which alone we are here to deal--and they exist as
independent integral twelfths of Israel, precisely like Ephraim
and Manasseh, throughout the whole period of the monarchy down to
the destruction of the kingdom by the Assyrians. /1/ This is
*****************************************
1. For Reuben see (in addition to 1Chronicles v. 1-10) v. 18, xi.
42, xii. 37. xxvi. 32, xxvii. 16, for Simeon, 1Chronicles iv.
24-43, with xii. 25, and 2Chronicles xv. 9, xxxiv. 6, observing
that in the last two passages Simeon is reckoned as belonging to
the northern kingdom, so as to complete the number of the ten
tribes.
****************************************
diametrically opposed to all authentic tradition; for to
maintain that nothing else is intended than a continued
subsistence of individual Simeonite and Reubenite families within
other tribes is merely a desperate resort of the harmonists, and
every attempt to tone down the fact that those extinct and
half-mythical tribes are in Chronicles placed side by side with
the rest without any distinction is equally illegitimate. The
historical value thus lost by the narrative as a whole cannot be
restored by the seeming truthfulness of certain details. Or is
more significance really to be attached to the wars of the Simeonites
and Reubenites against the Arabians than to the rest of the extemporised
wars of the kings of Judah against these children of the wilderness?
If only at least the names had not been "sons of Ham, and Mehunim
and Hagarenes " (iv. 40 seq. [Heb.], v. 10)! As for the
pedigrees and genealogical lists, are they to be accepted as
historical merely because their construction is not apparent to
us, and they evade our criticism? The language affords no room
for the conjecture that we here possess extracts from documents of
high antiquity (iv. 33, 38, 4I, v. 1 seq., 7, 9 seq.), and
proper names such as Elioenai and the like (iv. 35 seq.) are not
striking for their antique originality.
Of the remaining tribes, so far as they belong to Israel and not
to Judah, the next in the series after Reuben are the
trans-Jordanic (v. 11-26). They are said to have been numbered
in the days of Jotham of Judah and Jeroboam of Israel, on which
occasion 44,760 warriors were returned; they took the field
against the Hagarenes, Ituraeans, Nephishites, and Nabataeans,
gaining the victory and carrying off much booty, "for they
cried to God in the battle, and He was entreated of them because
they put their trust in Him." But afterwards they fell away
from the God of their fathers, and as a punishment were carried off
by Pul and Tiglath-Pileser to Armenia by the Chaboras and the
river of Gozan. Apart from the language, which in its edifying
tone is that of late Judaism, and leaving out of account the
enumeration "the sons of Reuben and the Gadites and half of the
tribe of Manasseh," the astonishing and highly doubtful
combinations are eloquent: Pul and Tiglath-Pileser, the Chaboras
and the river of Gozan, are hardly distinguished from each other;
Jotham and Jeroboam, on the other hand, make so impossible a
synchronism that the partisans of Chronicles will have it that
none is intended,--forgetful, to be sure, of Hosea i. 2, and
omitting to say what in that case Jotham of Judah has to do here
at all in this connection. The Hagarenes and Ituraeans too,
instead of (say) the Moabites and Ammonites, furnish food for
reflection, as also do the geographical statements that Gad had
his seat in Bashan and Manasseh in and near Lebanon. As for the
proper names of families and their heads, they are certainly
beyond our means of judging; the phrases however of the scheme
they fill (anshe shemoth rashe l'beth abotham, migrash, jahes)
are peculiar to the Priestly Code and Chronicles, and alongside of
elements which are old and attested from other quarters, occur
others that look very recent, as for example (v. 24) Eliel,
Azriel, Jeremiah, Hodaviah, Jahdiel.
In the introduction the Galilaean tribes have no prominent place,
but in the rest of the book they make a favourable appearance
(see especially 1Chronicles xii. 32-34, 40, and 2Chronicles xxx.
10, 11, 18); it readily occurs to one, especially in the
last-cited passage, to think of the later Judaising process in
Galilee. In Issachar there are stated to have been 87,000
fighting men in David's time (misparam l'toledotham l'beth
abotham, vii. 1-5); out of Zebulun and Naphtali, again, exactly
87,000 men came to David at Hebron, to anoint him and be feasted
three days,--it is carefully mentioned, however (xii. 40), that
they took their provisions up with them. The proper kernel of
Israel, Ephraim and Manasseh, is, in comparison with Simeon,
Reuben, Gad, Issachar, treated with very scant kindness (vii.
14-29),--a suspicious sign. The list of the families of Manasseh
is an artificial _rechauffe_ of elements gleaned anywhere; Maachah
passes for the wife as well as the sister of Machir, but being a
Gileaditess (Beth-Maachah), ought not to have been mentioned at
all in this place where the cis-Jordanic Manasseh is being spoken
of; to fill up blanks every contribution is thankfully
received. /1/ In the case of Ephraim a long and meagre genealogy
*****************************************
1 Kuenen, Th. Tijdschr., 1877, pp. 484, 488; Godsdienst v.
Isr., i. 165.
****************************************
only is given, which, begun in vers. 20, 21, and continued in
ver. 25, constantly repeats the same names (Tahath, Tahan,
1Samuel i. 1; Eladah, Laadan, Shuthelah, Telah), and finally
reaches its end and goal in Joshua, whose father Nun alone is
known to the older sources! Into the genealogy a wonderful
account of the slaying of the children of Ephraim by the men of
Gath (1Samuel iv.?) has found its way, and (like viii. 6, 7)
according to the prevailing view must be of venerable antiquity.
But in that case the statement of iv. 9 must also be very
ancient, which yet obviously is connected with the rise of the
schools of the scribes stated in ii. 55 to have existed in Jabez.
Everywhere it is presupposed that Israel throughout the entire
period of the monarchy was organised on the basis of the twelve
tribes (ii.-ix.; xii.; xxvii.), but the assumption is certainly
utterly false, as can be seen for example from 1Kings iv.
Further, the _penchant_ of later Judaism for statistics is carried
back to the earlier time, to which surveys and censuses were
repugnant in the extreme. In spite of 2Samuel xxiv., we are told
that under David enumerations both of the spiritual and of the
secular tribes were made again and again; so also under his
successors, as may be inferred partly from express statements
and partly from the precise statistics given as to the number
of men capable of bearing arms: in these cases the most astounding
figures are set down,--always, however, as resting on original
documents and accurate enumeration. In the statistical
information of Chronicles, then, so far as it relates to
pre-exilic antiquity, we have to do with artificial compositions.
It is possible, and occasionally demonstrable, that in these
some elements derived from tradition have been used. But it
is certain that quite as many have been simply invented; and
the combination of the elements--the point of chief importance--
dates, as both form and matter show, from the very latest period.
One might as well try to hear the grass growing as attempt to
derive from such a source as this a historical knowledge of
the conditions of ancient Israel.
VI.III.2. As regards Judah and Benjamin, and to a certain extent
Levi also, the case of course is somewhat different from that
of the ten extinct tribes. It is conceivable that here a living
ethno-genealogical tradition may have kept the present connected
with the past. Nevertheless, on closer examination, it comes out
that most of what the Chronicler here relates has reference to the
post-exilic time, and that the few fragments which go up to a
higher antiquity are wrought into a connection which on the
whole is of a very recent date. Most obtrusively striking is it
that the list of the heads of the people dwelling in Jerusalem
given in ix. 4--17 is simply identical with Nehemiah xi. 3-19. In
this passage, introducing as it does the history of the kings (x.
seq.), one is by no means prepared to hear statements about the
community of the second temple; but our author is under the
impression that in going there he is letting us know about the old
Jerusalem; from David to Nehemiah is no leap for him, the times
are not distinct from one another to his mind. For chap. viii.
also, containing a full enumeration of the Benjamite families,
with special reference to those which had their seat in the
capital, Bertheau has proved the post-exilic reference; it is
interesting that in the later Jerusalem there existed a widespread
family which wished to deduce its origin from Saul and rested its
claims to this descent on a long genealogy (viii. 33-40). /1/
*****************************************
1. Equivalent to ix. 35-44, which perhaps proves the later
interpolation of ix. 1-34.
***************************************
It cannot be said that this produces a very favourable impression
for the high antiquity of the other list of the Benjamites in vii.
6-11; to see how little value is to be attached to the pretensions
of the latter to be derived from original documents of hoary
antiquity, it is only necessary to notice the genuinely Jewish
phraseology of vers. 7, 9, 11, such proper names as Elioenai,
and the numbers given (22,034 + 20,200 + 17,200, making in all
59,434 fighting men).
The registers of greatest historical value are those relating
to the tribe of Judah (ii. 1-iV. 23). But in this statement
the genealogy of the descendants of David must be excepted
(chapter iii.), the interest of which begins only with Zerubbabel,
the rest being merely an exceedingly poor compilation of materials
still accessible to us in the older historical books of the canon,
and in Jeremiah. According to iii. 5, the first four of David's
sons, born in Jerusalem, were all children of Bathsheba; the
remaining seven are increased to nine by a textual error which
occurs also in the LXX version of 2Samuel v. 16. Among the sons
of Josiah (iii. 15 seq.), Johanan, i.e. Jehoahaz, is
distinguished from Shallum (Jeremiah xxii. 11), and because he
immediately succeeded his father, is represented as the
first-born, though in truth Jehoiakim was older (2Kings xxiii.
3I, 36); Zedekiah, Jehoiakim's brother, is given out to be the
son of Jeconiah, the son of Jehoiakim, because he was the
successor of Jeconiah, who succeeded Jehoiakim. Similar things
occur also in the Book of Daniel, but are usually overlooked, with
a mistaken piety. Whoever has eyes to see cannot assign any high
value except to the two great Jewish genealogies in chaps. ii.
and iv. Yet even here the most heterogeneous elements are tossed
together, and chaff is found mingled with wheat. /1/
**************************************
1. For further details the reader is referred to the author's
dissertation De gentibus et familiis Judaeis, Gottingen, 1870.
**************************************
Apart from the introduction, vers.1-8, chap. ii. is a genealogy
of the children of Hezron, a tribe which in David's time had not
yet been wholly amalgamated with Judah, but which even then
constituted the real strength of that tribe and afterwards became
completely one with it. The following scheme discloses itself
amid the accompanying matters: "The sons of Hezron are Jerahmeel
and Celubai" (Caleb) (ver. 9). "and the sons of Jerahmeel, the
first-born of Hezron, were..." (ver. 25). "These were the
sons of Jerahmeel. And the sons of Caleb the brother of Jerahmeel
were..." (ver. 42). "These were the sons of Caleb " (ver. 50 a).
That which is thus formally defined and kept by itself apart
(compare in this connection "Jerahmeel the first-born of Hezron,"
"Caleb the brother of Jerahmeel") is materially also distinguished
from all else. It is the kernel of the whole, and refers to the
pre-exilian time. Even the unusual _et fuerunt_ (vers. 25, 33,
50) points to this conclusion, as well as, in the case of Caleb,
the positive fact that the towns named in ver. 42-49 are all
situated near Hebron and in the Negeb of Judah, where after the
exile the Idumaeans were settled, and, in the case of Jerahmeel,
the negative circumstance that here no towns at all are mentioned
among the families, Molid, ver. 29, being perhaps a single
exception, and thus the extreme south is indicated. But this
kernel is amplified by a number of post-exilian additions. In
the first place, in connection with Jerahmeel, an appendix
(vers. 34-41) is given which is not ethnological but purely
genealogical, and brings a pedigree of fifteen members manifestly
down to near the age of the Chronicler, and which moreover is only
in apparent connection with what precedes it (comp. ver. 34 with
ver. 31), and invariably uses the hiphil form _holid_, a form
which occurs in vers. 25-33 never, and in vers. 42-50 only
sporadically in three places open to the suspicion of later
redaction (comp. especially ver. 47). Much more important,
however, are the additions under Caleb; of these the one is
prefixed (vers. 18-24), the other, more appropriately, brought in
at the close (vers. 50-55, beginning with "and the sons of Hur,
the firstborn of Ephrath," Caleb's second wife, ver. 19). Here
Caleb no longer presents himself in the extreme south of Judah and
the vicinity of Jerahmeel (1Samuel xxv. 3, xxvii. 10, xxx. 14,
29), where he had his settlement prior to the exile, but his
families, which are all of them descended from his son Hur,
inhabit Bethlehem, Kirjath-jearim, Zorah, Esthaol, and other towns
in the north, frequently mentioned in Ezra and Nehemiah. Thus
the Calebites in consequence of the exile have forsaken their old
seats and have taken up new ones on their return; this fact is
expressed in ver. 18 to the effect that Caleb's first wife Azubah
bath Jerioth (Deserta filia Nomadum) had died, and that he had then
married a second, Ephrath, by whom he became the father of Hur:
Ephrath is the name of the district in which Bethlehem and Kirjath-
jearim are situated, and properly speaking is merely another
form of Ephraim, as is shown by the word Ephrathite. In addition
to these appendices to Jerahmeel and Caleb, we have also the
genealogy of David (vers. 10-17). The Book of Samuel knows only
of his father Jesse; on the other hand, Saul's genealogy is
carried further back, and there was no reason for not doing so in
David's case also if the materials had existed. But here, as in
Ruth, the pedigree is traced backwards through Jesse, Obed, Boaz,
up to Salma. Salma is the father of Bethlehem (ii. 54), and hence
the father of David. But Salma is the father of Bethlehem and the
neighbouring towns or fractions of towns AFTER THE EXILE; he belongs
to Kaleb Abi Hur. /1/
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I In the Targum, Caleb's kindred the Kenites are designated as
Salmaeans; the name also occurs in Canticles (i. 5, the tents of
Kedar, the curtains of Salmah), and also as the name of a
Nabataean tribe in Pliny. Among the families of the Nethinim
enumerated in Nehemiah vii. 46-60 the B'ne Salmah also occur,
along with several other names which enable us distinctly to
recognise (Ezekiel xliv.) the non-Israelite and foreign origin
of these temple slaves; see, for example, vers. 48, 52, 55, 57.
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But if anything at all is certain, it is this, that in ancient times
the Calebites lived in the south and not in the north of Judah, and
in particular that David by his nativity belonged not to them but
rather to the older portion of Judah which gravitated towards
Israel properly so called, and stood in most intimate relations
with Benjamin. Of the first three members of the genealogy,
Nahshon and Amminadab occur as princes of Judah in the Priestly
Code, and are fitly regarded as the ancestors of those who come
after them; Ram is the first-born of Hezron's first-born (ver.
25), and by the meaning of his name also (Ram = the high one),
is, like Abram, qualified to stand at the head of the princely
line.
While in chap ii. we thus in point of fact fall in with an old
kernel, and one that necessarily goes back to sound tradition
(apparently preserved indeed, however, merely for the sake of
the later additions), the quite independent and parallel list,
on the other hand, contained in iv. 1-23 is shown by many
unmistakable indications to be a later composition having its
reference only to post-exilian conditions, perhaps incorporating
a few older elements, which, however, it is impossible with any
certainty to detect. /2/
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I Pharez, Hezron, Carmi, Hur, Shobal (iv. 1), is a genealogically
descending series; Chelubai must therefore of necessity be read
instead of Carmi, all the more because Chelub and not Carmi appears
in the third place in the subsequent expansion; for this, ascending
from below, begins with Shobal (ver. 2), then goes on to Hur
(vers. 5-10), who stands in the same relation to Ash-hur as Tob
to Ish-tob, and finally deals with Chelub or Caleb (vers. 11-15).
********************************************
Levi of course receives the fullest treatment (1Chronicles v. 27
[vi. 1]-vi. 66 [81], ix. 10 seq., xv., xvi., xxiii.-xxvii.,
&c.). We know that this clerical tribe is an artificial
production, and that its hierarchical subdivision, as worked out in
the Priestly Code, was the result of the centralisation of the
cultus in Jerusalem. Further, it has been already shown that in
the history as recorded in Chronicles the effort is most
conspicuous to represent the sons of Aaron and the Levites, in all
cases where they are absent from the older historical books of
the canon, as playing the part to which they are entitled according
to the Priestly Code. How immediate is the connection with the
last-named document, how in a certain sense that code is even
carried further by Chronicles, can be seen for example from this
circumstance, that in the former Moses in a novel reduces the
period of beginning public service in the case of a Levite from
thirty years of age to twenty-five (Numbers iv. 3 seq., viii. 23
seq.), while in the latter David (1Chronicles xxiii. 3, 24 seq.)
brings it down still further to the age of twenty; matters are
still to some extent in a state of flux, and the ordering of the
temple worship is a continuation of the beginning made with the
tabernacle service by Moses. Now, in so far as the statistics of
the clergy have a real basis at all, that basis is post-exilian.
It has long ago been remarked how many of the individuals
figuring under David and his successors (e.g., Asaph, Heman,
Jeduthun) bear names identical with families or guilds of a later
time, how the two indeed are constantly becoming confluent, and
difficulty is felt in determining whether by the expression
"head" a person or a family ought to be understood. But,
inasmuch as the Chronicler nevertheless desires to depict the
older time and not his own, he by no means adheres closely to
contemporary statistics, but gives free play at the same time to
his idealising imagination; whence it comes that in spite of the
numerous and apparently precise data afforded, the reader still
finds himself unable to form any clear picture of the
organisation of the clergy,--the ordering of the families and
tribes, the distribution of the offices,--nay, rather, is
involved in a maze of contradictions. Obededom, Jeduthun, Shelomith,
Korah, occur in the most different connections, belong now to one,
now to another section of the Levites, and discharge at one time
this function, at another, that. Naturally the commentators are
prompt with their help by distinguishing names that are alike,
and identifying names that are different.
Some characteristic details may still be mentioned here. The
names of the six Levitical classes according to 1Chronicles xxv. 4,
Giddalti, V'romamti-Ezer, Joshbekashah, Mallothi, Hothir,
Mahazioth, are simply the fragments of a consecutive sentence
which runs: I have magnified | and exalted the help | of him who
sat in need: | I have spoken | abundance of | prophecies. The
watchman or singer Obededom who is alleged to have discharged his
functions in the days of David and Amaziah, is no other than the
captain to whom David intrusted for three months the custody of
the ark, a Philistine of Gath. The composition of the singers'
pedigrees is very transparent, especially in the case of Heman
(1Chronicles vi. 7-l2 [22-27] = ver 18-23, [33-37]). Apart from
Exodus vi. 16-l9, use is chiefly made of what is said about the
family of Samuel (1Samuel i. 1, viii. 2), who must of course have
been of Levitical descent, because his mother consecrated him
to the service of the sanctuary. Heman is the son of Joel
b. Samuel b. Elkanah b. Jeroham b. Eliab b. Tahath b. Zuph,
only the line does not terminate with Ephraim as in 1Samuel
i. 1 (LXX) because it is Levi who is the goal; Zuph. however,
is an Ephraitic district, and Tahath (Tohu, Toah, Tahan, Nahath)
is an Ephraimite family (vii. 20). Further back the same elements
are individually repeated more than once, Elkanah four times
in all; he occurs once as early as in Exodus vi. 24, where also
he is doubtless borrowed from 1Samuel i. The best of it is that,
contrary to the scope of the genealogies recorded in1 Chronicles
vi., which is to provide a Levitical origin for the guilds of singers,
there is found in close contiguity the statement (ii. 6) that Heman
and Ethan were descendants of Zerah b. Pharez, b. JUDAH. The
commentators are indeed assisted in their efforts to differentiate
the homonyms by their ignorance of the fact that even as late as
Nehemiah's time the singers did not yet pass for Levites, but their
endeavours are wrecked by the circumstance that the names of
fathers as well as of sons are identical (Psalm lxxxviii. 1,
lxxxix. 1; Ewald, iii. 380 seq.). In point of history these
musicians of the second temple are descended of course neither
from Levi nor from the sons of Mahol (1Kings v. 11 [iv. 31), but
they have at least derived their names from the latter. On all
hands we meet with such artificial names in the case of Levites.
One is called Issachar; it would not be surprising to meet with a
Naphtali Cebi, or Judah b. Jacob. Jeduthun is, properly
speaking, the name of a tune or musical mode (Psalm xxxix. 1,
lxii. 1, [xxvii. 1), whence also of a choir trained in that.
Particularly interesting are a few pagan names, as for example
Henadad, Bakbuk, and some others, which, originally borne by the
temple servitors (Nehemiah vii. 46 seq.), were doubtless transferred
along with these to the Levites.
With the priests, of whom so many are named at all periods of the
history of Israel, matters are no better than with the inferior
Levites, so far as the Books of Samuel and Kings are not drawn
upon. In particular, the twenty-four priestly courses or orders
are an institution, not of King David, but of the post-exilic period.
When Hitzig, annotating Ezekiel viii. 16, remarks that the
five-and-twenty men standing between the temple and the altar
worshipping the sun toward the east are the heads of the twenty-four
priestly courses with the high priest at their head (because no one
else had the right to stand in the inner court between temple and
altar), he reveals a trait that is characteristic, not only of
himself, but also of the entire so-called historico-critical school,
who exert their whole subtlety on case after case, but never give
themselves time to think matters over in their connection with each
other; nay, rather simply retain the traditional view as a whole,
only allowing themselves by way of gratification a number of
heresies. It is almost impossible to believe that Hitzig, when he
annotated Ezekiel viii., could have read those passages Ezekiel
xliii. 7 seq., xliv. 6 seq, from which it is most unambiguously
clear that the later exclusion of the laity from the sanctuary
was quite unknown in the pre-exilic period. The extent of the
Chronicler's knowledge about the pre-exilic priesthood is revealed
most clearly in the list of the twenty-two high priests in
1Chronicles v. 29-41 (vi. 3-15). From the ninth to the eighteenth
the series runs--Amariah, Ahitub, Zadok, Ahimaaz, Azariah,
Johanan, Azariah, Amariah, Ahitub, Zadok. As for the first five,
Azariah was not the son, but the brother of Ahimaaz, and the
latter apparently not a priest (1Kings iv. 2); but Ahitub, the
alleged father of Zadok, was, on the contrary, the grandfather of
Zadok's rival, Abiathar, of the family of Eli (1Samuel xiv. 3,
xxii. 20); the whole of the old and famous line--Eli, Phinehas,
Ahitub; Ahimelech, Abiathar--which held the priesthood of the ark
from thc time of the judges down into the days of David, is passed
over in absolute silence, and the line of Zadok, by which it was
not superseded until Solomon (1Kings ii. 35), is represented as
having held the leadership of the priesthood since Moses. As for
the last four in the above-cited list, they simply repeat the
earlier. In the Book of Kings, Azariah II., Amariah, Ahitub,
Zadok, do not occur, but, on the contrary, other contemporary high
priests, Jehoiada and Urijah, omitted from the enumeration in
Chronicles. At the same time this enumeration cannot be asserted
to be defective; for, according to Jewish chronology, the ancient
history is divided into two periods, each of 480 years, the one
extending from the exodus to the building of the temple, the other
from that epoch down to the establishment of the second theocracy.
Now, 480 years are twelve generations of forty years, and in
1Chronicles v. there are twelve high priests reckoned to the period
during which there was no temple (ver. 36b to come after ver. 35a),
and thence eleven down to the exile; that is to say, twelve generations,
when the exile is included. The historical value of the genealogy
in 1Chronicles v. 26-41 is thus inevitably condemned. But if
Chronicles knew nothing about the priestly princes of the olden
time, its statements about ordinary priests are obviously little
to be relied on.
VI.III.3. To speak of a tradition handed down from pre-exilic times
as being found in Chronicles, either in 1Chronicles i.-ix. or in
1Chronicles x.-2Chronicles xxxvi., is thus manifestly out of the
question. As early as 1806 this had been conclusively shown by
the youthful De Wette (then twenty-six years of age). But since
that date many a theological Sisyphus has toiled to roll the
stone again wholly or half-way up the hill--Movers especially, in
genius it might seem the superior of the sober Protestant
critic--with peculiar results. This scholar mixed up the inquiry
into the historical value of those statements in Chronicles which
we are able to control, with the other question as to the probable
sources of its variations from the older historical books of the
canon. In vain had De Wette, at the outset, protested against
such a procedure, contending that it was not only possible, but
conceded that Chronicles, where at variance or in contradiction,
was following older authority, but that the problem still really
was, as before, how to explain the complete difference of general
conception and the multitude of discrepancies in details; that
the hypothesis of "sources," as held before Movers by Eichhorn,
was of no service in dealing with this question, and that in the
critical comparison of the two narratives, and in testing their
historical character, it was after all incumbent to stick to what
lay before one (Beitr., i. pp. 24, 29, 38). For so ingenious
an age such principles were too obvious; Movers produced a great
impression, especially as he was not so simple as to treat the
letters of Hiram and Elijah as authentic documents, but was by way
of being very critical. At present even Dillmann also
unfortunately perceives "that the Chronicler everywhere has
worked according to sources, and that in his case deliberate
invention or distortion of the history are not for a moment to be
spoken of" (Herzog, Realencyk., ii. p. 693, 1st edit.; iii.
223, 2d edit.). And from the lofty heights of science the author
of Part V. of the Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament
looks compassionately down upon K. H. Graf, "who has loitered
so far behind the march of Old Testament research, as to have
thought of resuscitating the views of De Wette;" in fact,
that Chronicles may be established on an independent footing and
placed on a level with the Books of Samuel and Kings, he utterly
denies any indebtedness at all, on its part, to these, and in
cases where the transcription is word for word, maintains that
separate independent sources were made use of,--a needless
exaggeration of the scientific spirit, for the author of the Book
of Kings himself wrote the prayer of Solomon and the epitome, at
least, without borrowing from another source; the Chronicler
therefore can have derived it, directly or indirectly, only from
him.
In reply to all this, one can only repeat what has already been
said by De Wette. It may be that the Chronicler has produced
this picture of old Israel, so different in outline and colour
from the genuine tradition, not of his own suggestion and on his
own responsibility, but on the ground of documents that lay
before him. But the historical character of the work is not
hereby altered in the smallest degree, it is merely shared by
the so-called "sources." 2Maccabees and a multitude of other
compositions have also made use of "sources," but how does this
enhance the value of their statements? That value must in the
long run be estimated according to their contents, which, again,
must be judged, not by means of the primary sources which have
been lost, but by means of the secondary literary products
which have survived. The whole question ultimately resolves
itself into that of historical credibility; and to what
conclusions this ]eads we have already seen. The alterations and
additions of Chronicles are all traceable to the same
fountain-head--the Judaising of the past, in which otherwise the
people of that day would have been unable to recognise their
ideal. It was not because tradition gave the Law and the
hierocracy and the _Deus ex Machina_ as sole efficient factor in
the sacred narrative, but because these elements were felt to be
missing, that they were thus introduced. If we are to explain
the _omissions_ by reference to the "author's plan," why may we
not apply the same principle to the _additions_? The passion
displayed by Ewald ( Jahrbb. x. 261) when, in speaking of the
view that Manasseh's captivity has its basis in Jewish dogmatic,
he calls it "an absurdly infelicitous idea, and a gross injustice
besides to the Book of Chronicles," recalls B. Schaefer's
suggestive remark about the Preacher of Solomon, that God would
not use a liar to write a canonical book. What then does Ewald
say to the narratives of Daniel or Jonah? Why must the new turn
given to history in the case of Manasseh be judged by a different
standard than in the equally gross case of Ahaz, and in the numerous
analogous instances enumerated in preceding pages (p. 203 seq.).
With what show of justice can the Chronicler, after his statements
have over and over again been shown to be incredible, be held at
discretion to pass for an unimpeachable narrator? In those cases
at least where its connection with his "plan" is obvious, one ought
surely to exercise some scepticism in regard to his testimony;
but it ought at the same time to be considered that such
connections may occur much oftener than is discernible by us,
or at least by the less sharp-sighted of us. It is indeed possible
that occasionally a grain of good corn may occur among the chaff,
but to be conscientious one must neglect this possibility of
exceptions, and give due honour to the probability of the rule.
For it is only too easy to deceive oneself in thinking that one
has come upon some sound particular in a tainted whole. To what
is said in 2Samuel v. 9, "So David dwelt in the stronghold (Jebus),
and he called it the city of David, and he built round about from
the rampart and inward," there is added in 1Chronicles xi. 8, the
statement that "Joab restored the rest of the city (Jerusalem)."
This looks innocent enough, and is generally accepted as a fact.
But the word XYH for BNH shows the comparatively modern date of
the statement, and on closer consideration one remembers also that
the town of Jebus at the time of its conquest by David consisted
only of the citadel, and the new town did not come into existence
at all until later, and therefore could not have been repaired by
Joab; in what interest the statement was made can be gathered from
Nehemiah vii. 11. In many cases it is usual to regard such
additions as having had their origin in a better text of Samuel
and Kings which lay before the Chronicler; and this certainly
is the most likely way in which good additions could have got in.
But the textual critics of the _Exegetical Handbook_ are only too
like-minded with the Chronicler, and are always eagerly seizing
with both hands his paste pearls and the similar gifts of the
Septuagint.
It must be allowed that Chronicles owes its origin, not to the
arbitrary caprice of an individual, but to a general tendency of
its period. It is the inevitable product of the conviction that
the Mosaic law is the starting-point of Israel's history, and
that in it these is operative a play of sacred forces such as
finds no other analogy; this conviction could not but lead to
a complete transformation of the ancient tradition.
Starting from a similar assumption, such an author as C. F. Keil
could even at the present day write a book of Chronicles, if this
were not already in existence. Now, in this aspect, for the
purpose of appraising Chronicles as the type of that conception of
history which the scribes cherished, the inquiry into its "sources"
is really important and interesting. References to other writings,
from which further particulars can be learned, are appended as a rule,
to the account of each sovereign's reign, the exceptions being in
the cases of Joram, Ahaziah, Athaliah, Amon, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim,
Zedekiah. The titles referred to in this way may be classed under
two groups:
(1.) The Book of the Kings of Israel and Judah, or of Judah and Israel
(in the cases of Asa, Amaziah, Jotham; Ahaz, Josiah, and Jehoiakim),
with which the Book of the Kings of Israel (in the cases of Jehoshaphat
and Manasseh; comp. 1Chronicles ix. 1) is identical, for the kingdom
of the ten tribes is not reckoned by the Chronicler.
(2.) The Words of Samuel the Seer, Nathan the Prophet, and Gad the Seer
(for David; 1Chronicles xxix. 29; comp. xxvii. 24; Ecclus. xlvi. 13,
xlvii. 1); the Words of Nathan the Prophet, the Prophecy of Ahijah
of Shiloh and the Vision of Iddo the Seer concerning Jeroboam
ben Nebat (for Solomon; 2Chronicles ix. 29); the Words of Shemaiah
the Prophet and Iddo the Seer (for Rehoboam; xii. 15); the words
of Jehu ben Hanani, which are taken over into the Book of the Kings
of Israel (Jehoshaphat; xx. 34); a writing of Isaiah the prophet
(Uzziah; xxvi. 22), more precisely cited as the Vision of Isaiah
the Prophet, the son of Amoz, in the Book of the Kings of Judah
and Israel (Hezekiah; xxxii. 32); the Words of the Seer in the Book
of the Kings of Israel (Manasseh; xxxiii. 18; comp. also ver. 19).
Following in the footsteps of Movers, Bertheau and others have shown
that under these different citations it is always one and the same
book that is intended, whether by its collective title, or by the
conventional sub-titles of its separate sections. /1/ Bertheau calls
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1. In Ezra and Nehemiah also the Chronicler has not used so many
sources as are usually supposed. There is no reason for refusing
to identify the "lamentations" of 2Chronicles xxxv. 25, with our
Lamentations of Jeremiah: at least the reference to the death of
Josiah (Jos., Ant. x. 5, 1), erroneously attributed to them,
ought not in candour to be regarded as such.
*******************************************
attention to the fact that ordinarily it is either the one or the
other title that is given, and when, as is less usual, there are
two, then for the most part the prophetic writing is designated as
a portion of the Book of the Kings of Israel (xx. 34, xxxii. 32;
and, quite vaguely, xxxiii. 18). The peculiar mode of naming the
individual section-/1/-at a time when chapters and verses were
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1 Romans xi. 2: )EN (HLLLA| TI LEGEI )H GRAFH i.e., How stands it
written in the section relating to Elijah?
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unknown--has its origin in the idea that each period of the sacred
history has its leading prophet [)AXRIBHS TWN PROFHTWN DIADOXH;
Jos., c. Ap. i. 8), but also at the same time involves (according
to xxvi. 22, in spite of ix. 29, xii. 15, xiii. 22; 1Chronicles xxix.
29) the notion that each prophet has himself written the history
of his own period. Obviously, this is the explanation of the title
_prophetae priores_ borne by the Books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel,
and Kings in the Jewish canon, and of the view which led to the
introduction of 2Kings xviii. 18 seq. into the Book of Isaiah.
The claims of history being slight, it was easy to find the needful
_propheta eponymus_ for each section. Jehu ben Hanani, a northern
Israelite of Baasha's time, has to do duty for Asa, and also for
Jehoshaphat as well. Iddo the seer, who prophesied against Jeroboam
ben Nebat, is the anonymous prophet of 1Kings xiii. (Jos., Ant.
viii. 8, 5; Jer. on Zechariah i. 1); by this time it was possible,
also, to give the names of the wives of Cain, and of the patriarchs.
As regards a more definite determination of the date of the "Book
of Kings" which lies at the foundation of Chronicles, a
co-ordination of the two series of the Kings of Israel and Judah
can only have been made after both had been brought to a close;
in other words, not before the Babylonian exile. And in the
Babylonian exile it was that the canonical Book of Kings actually
came into existence, and the "Chronicles" of Israel and those of
Judah were for the first time worked together by its author; at
least he refers only to the separate works and knows of no
previous combination of them. It would seem, therefore, very
natural to identify the work alluded to in Chronicles with our
present canonical book, which is similar in title and has
corresponding contents. But this we cannot do, for in the former
there were matters of which there are in the latter no trace; for
example, according to 1Chronicles ix. 1, it contained family and
numerical statistics for the whole of Israel after the manner of
1Chronicles i.-ix. (chapters for the most part borrowed from it)
and according to 1Chronicles xxxiii 19, the Prayer of Manasseh.
From these two data, as well as from the character of the items
of information which may have been conjectured to have been derived
from this source, the conclusion is forced upon us that the Book
of Kings cited by the Chronicler is a late compilation far removed
from actual tradition, and in relation to the canonical Book of
Kings it can only be explained as an apocryphal amplification after
the manner in which the scribes treated the sacred history. This
conclusion, derived from the contents themselves, is supported by
an important positive datum, namely, the citation in 2Chronicles
xxiv. 27 of the Midrash [A.V. "Story"] of the Book of Kings, and
in xiii. 22 of the Midrash of the prophet Iddo. Ewald is undoubtedly
right when he recognises here the true title of the writing elsewhere
named simply the Book of Kings. Of course the commentators assert
that the word Midrash, which occurs in the Bible only in these two
passages, there means something quite different from what it means
everywhere else; but the natural sense suits admirably well and
in Chronicles we find ourselves fully within the period of the
scribes. Midrash is the consequence of the conservation of all
the relics of antiquity, a wholly peculiar artificial reawakening
of dry bones, especially by literary means, as is shown by
the preference for lists of names and numbers. Like ivy it
overspreads the dead trunk with extraneous life, blending old and
new in a strange combination. It is a high estimate of tradition
that leads to its being thus modernised; but in the process it is
twisted and perverted, and set off with foreign accretions in the
most arbitrary way. Jonah as well as Daniel and a multitude of
apocryphal writings (2Maccabees ii. 13) are connected with this
tendency to cast the reflection of the present back into the past;
the Prayer of Manasseh, which now survives only in Greek,
appears, as Ewald has conjectured, actually to have been taken
direct from the book quoted in 2Chronicles xxxiii. 19. Within this
sphere, wherein all Judaism moves, Chronicles also has had its
rise. Thus whether one says Chromcles or Midrash of the Book of
Kings is on the whole a matter of perfect indifference; they are
children of the same mother, and indistinguishable in spirit and
language, while on the other hand the portions which have been
retained verbatim from the canonical Book of Kings at once betray
themselves in both respects.
CHAPTER VII. JUDGES, SAMUEL, AND KINGS.
In the history of Hebrew literature, so full as it is of
unfortunate accidents, one lucky circumstance at least requires
to be specially mentioned. Chronicles did not succeed in
superseding the historical books upon which it was founded; the
older and the newer version have been preserved together. But in
Judges, Samuel, and Kings even, we are not presented with
tradition purely in its original condition; already it is
overgrown with later accretions. Alongside of an older narrative
a new one has sprung up, formerly independent, and intelligible in
itself, though in many instances of course adapting itself to the
former. More frequently the new forces have not caused the old
root to send forth a new stock, or even so much as a complete
branch; they have only nourished parasitic growths; the
earlier narrative has become clothed with minor and dependent
additions. To vary the metaphor, the whole area of tradition has
finally been uniformly covered with an alluvial deposit by which
the configuration of the surface has been determined. It is with
this last that we have to deal in the first instance; to
ascertain its character, to find out what the active forces were
by which it was produced. Only afterwards are we in a position
to attempt to discern in the earlier underlying formation the
changing spirit of each successive period.
VII.I.
VII.I.1. The following prologue supplies us with the point of view
from which the period of the judges is estimated.
"After the death of Joshua, the children of Israel did evil in the
sight of the Lord and forsook the Lord God of their fathers, who
brought them out of the land of Egypt, and followed other gods,
of the gods of the people that were round about them, the Baals
and Astartes. And the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel,
and He delivered them into the hands of spoilers, that spoiled
them and sold them into the hand of their enemies round about;
whithersoever they went out the hand of the Lord was against
them for evil, as the Lord had said, and as the Lord had sworn
unto them; and they were greatly distressed. Nevertheless the
Lord raised up unto them judges, and was with the judge, and
delivered them out of the hand of their enemies all the days
of the judge, for it repented the Lord because of their
groanings, by reason of them that oppressed them and vexed them.
And it came to pass when the judge was dead that they returned
and corrupted themselves more than their fathers, in following
other gods to serve them; they ceased not from their own doings,
nor from their stubborn way. And the anger of the Lord was hot
against Israel," &c. &c. (Judges ii.).
Such is the text, afterwards come the examples.
"And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord,
and forget the Lord their God, and served the Baals and Astartes.
Therefore the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel, and He
sold them into the hand of Chushan-Rishathaim, king of Mesopotamia,
and they served him eight years. And when the children of Israel
cried unto the Lord, the Lord raised up to them a helper, Othniel
b. Kenaz, and delivered the king of Mesopotamia into his hand,
and the land had rest forty years. And Othniel b. Kenaz died."
The same points of view and also for the most part the same
expressions as those which in the case of Othniel fill up the
entire cadre, recur in the cases of Ehud, Deborah, Gideon,
Jephthah, and Samson, but there form only at the beginning and at
the end of the narratives a frame which encloses more copious and
richer contents, occasionally they expand into more exhaustive
disquisitions, as in vi. 7, x. 6. It is in this way that Judges
ii.-xvi. has been constructed with the workman-like regularity it
displays. Only the six great judges, however are included within
the scheme; the six small ones stand in an external relation to it,
and have a special scheme to themselves, doubtless having been
first added by way of appendix to complete the number twelve.
The features which characterise this method of historical work are
few and strongly distinctive. A continuous chronology connects
the times of rest and their separating intervals, and thereby the
continuity of the periods is secured. In order justly to
estimate this chronology, it is necessary to travel somewhat
beyond the limits of Judges. The key to it is to be found in
1Kings vi. 1.
"In the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of
Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year
of the reign of Solomon, he began to build the house of the Lord."
As observed by Bertheau, and afterwards by Noldeke, who has still
farther pursued the subject, these 480 years correspond to 12
generations of 40 years each. Analogously in 1Chronicles v. 29-34
[vi. 2-8], 12 high priests from Aaron to Ahimaaz are assumed for
the same period of time, and the attempt was made to make their
successions determine those of the generations (Numbers xxxv. 28).
Now it is certainly by no means at once clear how this total is
to be brought into accord with the individual entries. Yet even
these make it abundantly plain that 40 is the fundamental number
of the reckoning. The wandering in the wilderness, during which
the generation born in Egypt dies out, lasts for 40 years; the
land has 40 years of rest under Othniel, Deborah, and again under
Gideon; it has 80 under Ehud; the domination of the Philistines
lasts for 40 years, the duration also of David's reign. On the
necessary assumption that the period of the Philistines
(Judges xiii. 1), which far exceeds the ordinary duration of the
foreign dominations, coincides with that of Eli (1Samuel iv. 18),
and at the same time includes the 20 years of Samson (Judges
xvi. 31), and the 20 of the interregnum before Samuel (1Samuel
vii. 2), we have already 8 x 40 accounted for, while 4 x 40 still
remain. For these we must take into account first the years of
the two generations for which no numbers are given, namely,
the generation of Joshua and his surviving contemporaries
(Judges ii. 7), and that of Samuel to Saul, each, it may be
conjectured, having the normal 40, and the two together
certainly reckoning 80 years. For the remaining 80 the most
disputable elements are the 71 years of interregna or of
foreign dominations, and the 70 of the minor judges. One
perceives that these two figures cannot both be counted in,--they
are mutually exclusive equivalents. For my own part, I prefer to
retain the interregna; they alone, so far as we can see at
present, being appropriate to the peculiar scheme of the Book of
Judges. The balance of 9 or IO years still remaining to be
applied are distributed between Jephthah (6 years), and Solomon
(down to the building of the temple), who claims 3 or 4 years, or,
if these are left out of account, 3 years may be given to
Abimelech.
The main thing, however, is not the chronology, but the religious
connection of the events. The two are intimately associated, not
only formally, as can be gathered from the scheme, but also by a
real inner connection. For what is aimed at in both alike is a
connected view of large periods of time, a continuous survey
of the connection and succession of race after race, the detailed
particulars of the occurrences being disregarded; the historical
factors with which the religious pragmatism here has to do are so
uniform that the individual periods in reality need only to be
filled up with the numbers of the years. One is reminded of the
"Satz," `"Gegensatz," and "Vermittelung" of the Hegelian philosophy
when one's ear has once been caught by the monotonous beat with
which the history here advances, or rather moves in a circle.
Rebellion, affliction, conversion, peace; rebellion, affliction,
conversion, peace. The sole subjects of all that is said are
Jehovah and Israel; their mutual relation alone it is that keeps
the course of things in motion, and that too in opposite directions,
so that in the end matters always return to their original position.
"They did what was evil in the sight of Jehovah, they went
a-whoring after strange gods,"-such is the uninterrupted key-note.
Although Jehovistic monolatry is so potently recommended from
without, it yet takes no firm root, never becomes natural to the
people, always remains a precept above and beyond their powers.
For decennia on end indeed they hold fast to it, but soon their
idolatrous tendency, which has only been repressed by fear of the
judge during his lifetime, again finds expression; they must have
a change. Now this rebellion is indeed quite indispensable for
the pragmatism, because otherwise there would be nothing at all
to tell; it is on the unrest in the clock that the whole movement
depends. But at the same time this is of course no extenuation;
the conduct of the people is manifestly totally inexcusable,
the main actions, the deeds of the judges, are for this manner
of historical treatment always only proofs of Israel's sin and
of the unmerited grace of Jehovah that puts them to shame.
That all this is no part of the original contents of the tradition,
but merely a uniform in which it is clothed, is admitted. _Numero
Deus impare gaudet_. It is usual to call this later revision
Deuteronomistic. The law which Jehovah has enjoined upon the
fathers, and the breach of which He has threatened severely to
punish (ii. 15, 21), is not indeed more definitely characterised,
but it is impossible to doubt that its quintessence is the
injunction to worship Jehovah alone and no other God. Now in this
connection it is impossible to think of the Priestly Code, for
in that document such a command is nowhere expressly enjoined,
but, on the contrary, is assumed as a matter of course.
Deuteronomy, on the other hand, has in fact no precept on which it
lays greater emphasis than the "Hear, O Israel-"-that Jehovah is
the only God, and the worship of strange gods the sin of sins.
This precept was apprehended much more clearly by contemporaries
than the moral demands in the interest of humanity and kindness
which are also insisted on in Deuteronomy, but are not new, being
derived from older collections; on this side alone, in so far as
it follows up the monotheism of the prophets into its practical
consequences within the sphere of worship, has Josiah's law-book
had historical importance, on this side alone has it continued to
act upon Ezekiel and those who came after him. If, then, the norm
of the theocratic relationship assumed in the redaction of the
Book of Judges is to be sought in a written Torah, this can
indubitably only be that of Deuteronomy. The decisive
settlement of the question depends in a comparison with the Book
of Kings, and must accordingly be postponed until then.
VII.I.2. As for the relation between this superstructure and that
on which it rests, there is a striking difference between the two
styles. The revised form in which the Book of Judges found its
way into the canon is unquestionably of Judaean origin, but the
histories themselves are not such,--nay, in the song of Deborah,
Judah is not reckoned at all as belonging to Israel. The one judge
who belongs to the tribe of Judah is Othniel, who however is not a
person, but only a clan. What is said of him is quite void of
contents, and is made up merely of the schematic devices of the
redactor, who has set himself to work here, so as to make the
series open with a man of Judah; the selection of Othniel was
readily suggested by Judges i. 12-15. Here again we have an
exception which proves the rule. More important are the inner
differences which reveal themselves. To begin with the most
general,--the historical continuity on which so much stress is
laid by the scheme, is in no way shown in the individual
narratives of the Book of Judges. These stand beside one another
unconnectedly and without any regard to order or sequence, like
isolated points of light which emerge here and there out of the
darkness of forgetfulness. They make no presence of actually
filling up any considerable space of time; they afford no
points of attachment whereon to fasten a chronology. In truth, it
is hardly the dim semblance of a continuity that is imparted to
the tradition by the empty framework of the scheme. The
conception of a period of the judges between Joshua and Saul,
during which judges ruled over Israel and succeeded one another
almost as regularly as did the kings at a later period, is quite
foreign to that tradition. It is impossible to doubt that
Judges i., xvii., xviii. have the best right to be reckoned as
belonging to the original stock; but these portions are excluded
from reception within the scheme, because they have nothing to
say about any judges, and give a picture of the general state
of affairs which accords but ill with that plan. /1/
**********************************************
1. The redaction, as is well knows, extends only from ii. 6 xvi. 31,
thus excluding both i. 1-ii. 5, and xvii. 1-xxi. 24. But
it is easy to perceive how excellently the first portion fits
into its place as a general introduction to the period between
Moses and the monarchy, and how much more informing and
instructive it is in this respect than the section which follows.
There exists besides a formal connection between i. 16 and iv. 11.
As regards chaps. xvii., xviii., this story relating to the
migration of Dan northwards is plainly connected with that
immediately preceding where the tribe still finds itself "in the
camp of Dan," but is hard pressed and obtains no relief even with
the aid of Samson. In the case of chaps. xix.-xxi., indeed, it
admits of doubt whether they were excluded from the redaction, or
whether they were not extant as yet; but it is worth noticing
that here also chaps. xvii., xviii. are assumed as having gone
before. The Levite of Bethlehem-Judah testifies to this, and
especially the reminiscence contained in xix. 1, which, as we
shall see, has nothing to rest on in chaps. xix.-xxi.
Compare further xx. 19 with i. 1 seq.
********************************************
At the bottom of the spurious continuity lies an erroneous
widening of the areas in which the judges exerted their influence.
Out of local contiguity has arisen succession in time, what was
true of the part having been transferred to the whole; it is
always the children of Israel in a body who come upon the scene,
are oppressed by the enemy, and ruled by the judges. In reality
it is only the individual tribes that come into the action; the
judges are tribal heroes,--Ehud of Benjamin, Barak and Deborah of
Issachar, Gideon of Joseph, Jephthah of Gilead, Samson of Dan. It
was only for the struggle against Sisera that a number of tribes
were united, receiving on that account extraordinary praise in
the song of Deborah. It is nowhere said "at the time when the
judges ruled," but "at the time when there was yet no king over
Israel, and every man did what was right in his own eyes; " the
regular constitution of the period is the patriarchal anarchy of
the system of families and septs. And in chap. i, division and
isolation are made to appear not unclearly as the reason why the
Canaanites were so long of being driven out from the greater
cities; matters did not change until Israel became strong, that
is to say, until his forces were welded into one by means of the
monarchy.
But the unity of Israel is the presupposition upon which rests the
theocratic relation, the reciprocal attitude between Israel and
Jehovah, whereby according to the scheme the course of the
history is solely conditioned. In the genuine tradition the
presupposition disappears, and in connection with this the whole
historical process assumes an essentially different, not to say a
more natural aspect. The people are no longer as a body driven
hither and thither by the same internal and external impulses,
and everything that happens is no longer made to depend on the
attraction and repulsion exercised by Jehovah. Instead of the
alternating see-saw of absolute peace and absolute affliction,
there prevails throughout the whole period a relative unrest;
here peace, there struggle and conflict. Failure and success
alternate, but not as the uniform consequences of loyalty or
disobedience to the covenant. When the anonymous prophet who, in
the insertion in the last redaction (chap. vi. 7-10), makes his
appearance as suddenly as his withdrawal is abrupt, improves the
visitation of the Midianites as the text for a penitential
discourse, the matter is nevertheless looked at immediately
thereafter with quite different eyes. For to the greeting of the
angel, "Jehovah is with thee, thou mighty man of velour," Gideon
answers, "If Jehovah be with us, why then is all this befallen
us? and where be all His miracles, of which our fathers told
us ? "He knows nothing about any guilt on the part of Israel.
Similarly the heroic figures of the judges refuse to fit in with
the story of sin and rebellion: they are the pride of their
countrymen, and not humiliating reminders that Jehovah had
undeservedly again and again made good that which men had
destroyed. Finally, with what artificiality the sins which
appear to be called for are produced, is incidentally made very
clear. After the death of Gideon we read in chap. viii. 33,
"the children of Israel went a-whoring after the Baals, and made
Baal Berith their god." But from the following chapter it appears
that Baal or El Berith was only the patron god of Shechem and some
other cities belonging to the Canaanites; the redactor transforms
the local worship of the Canaanites into an idolatrous worship on
the part of all Israel. In other cases his procedure is still
more simple,--for example, in x. 6 seq., where the number seven
in the case of the deities corresponds with the number seven of
the nations mentioned in that connection. Ordinarily he is
content with "Baals " or "Astartes " or "Asheras," where the
plural number is enough to show how little of what is individual
or positive underlies the idea, not to mention that Asheras are
no divinities at all, but only sacred trees or poles.
In short, what is usually given out as the peculiar theocratic
element in the history of Israel is the element which has been
introduced by the redaction. There sin and grace are introduced
as forces into the order of events in the most mechanical way, the
course of events is systematically withdrawn from all analogy,
miracles are nothing extraordinary, but are the regular form in
which things occur, are matters of course, and produce absolutely
no impression. This pedantic supra-naturalism, "sacred history"
according to the approved recipe, is not to be found in the
original accounts. In these Israel is a people just like other
people, nor is even his relationship to Jehovah otherwise conceived
of than is for example that of Moab to Chemosh (chap. xi. 24).
Of theophanies and manifestations of the Godhead there is no lack,
but the wonders are such as to make one really wonder. Once and
again they interrupt the earthly nexus, but at the same time
they form no connected system; they are poetry, not prose and
dogma. But on the whole the process of history, although to
appearance rougher and more perplexed, is nevertheless in reality
much more intelligible, and though seemingly more broken up,
actually advances more continuously. There is an ascent upward
to the monarchy, not a descent from the splendid times of Moses
and Joshua (Judges i. 28-35, xiii. 5, xviii. 1).
One narrative, it is true, apart from that relating to Othniel,
which is not to be reckoned here, is exactly what sacred history
ought to be in order to fit into the theoretical scheme,--I mean
Judges xix.-xxi. To appreciate it rightly it will be well first
of all to cast a glance upon the preceding narrative relating to
the migration of the tribe of Dan to the north. The Danites, 600
strong, fall upon the Canaanite town of Laish not because it lies
within the limits assigned to the people of God, and because its
conquest is a duty--though they inquire of the oracle, they are
nevertheless far from relying on the divine right so plainly made
known in the Book of Joshua--but because it is inhabited by a
peaceable and unsuspecting people, which is quite defenceless
against such a band of desperadoes; and they have as little
scruple in practicing the same treachery to Israelites such as
Micah. They take it that might is right, and recognise no
restraining consideration; their conduct is natural to the verge
of absolute shamelessness. And yet they are pious in their way;
how highly they value Jehovah they show by this, that they steal
His image out of the house of God, and the priest who keeps it
into the bargain. As for the religious usages mentioned in the
two chapters, hardly an abomination forbidden by the Law is wanting:
the private sanctuary in the possession of the Ephraimite Micah,
the grandson of Moses as priest in his service and pay, ephod
and teraphim as the requisite necessaries in the worship of Jehovah;
and yet all this is so recounted by the narrator as if it were all
quite regular and void of offence, although his purpose in doing so
is not to narrate temporary departures from rule, but the origin of
permanent institutions at a chief sanctuary of ancient Israel.
One is translated into another world on passing from this to the
narrative immediately following, about the shameful deed of the
Benjamites and their exemplary punishment; a greater or more
instructive contrast as regards religious history is hardly to be
found in all the Old Testament. In Judges xx.-xxi. it is not as
invariably elsewhere the individual tribes which act, not even
the people Israel, but the congregation of the covenant, which has
its basis in the unity of worship. The occasion of their action
is a sin committed in their midst which must be done away; it is
the sanctity of the theocracy which brings these 400,000 men to
arms and fills them at once with unction and with sanguinary
zeal. The clerical instincts have entirely taken possession of
this uniform mass, have passed into their flesh and blood, and
moulded them into a single automaton, so that all that takes place
is invariably done by all at once. No individuals come to the
front, not even by name, still less by deeds of velour; the
moral tone is anything but heroic. When the godless reprobates of
Gibeah seek to assail the person of the Levite who is passing the
night there, he hands over to them his wife in order to save
himself, and all Israel finds nothing objectionable in this
revolting act of cowardice, the opinion probably being that by
his conduct the holy man had kept the sinners from still graver
guilt.
"Of the Mosaic law not a word is said in these chapters,
but who could fail to perceive that the spirit which finds its
expression in the law pervaded the community which acted thus?
Had we more narratives of similar contents we should be able to
solve many a riddle of the Pentateuch. Where under the monarchy
could we find an Israel so united, vigorous, earnest, so willing
to enter upon the severest conflict for the sake of the highest
ends? "Thus Bertheau, rightly feeling that this story has a
quite exceptional position, and contradicts all that we learn from
other quarters of the period of the judges or even the kings.
Only we cannot reckon it a proof of the historic value of the story,
that it gives the lie to the rest of the tradition in the Books of
Judges, Samuel, and Kings, and is homogeneous not with these books
but with the Law. On the other hand, the writer betrays himself
with a self-contradiction, when, unconsciously remembering the
preceding chapters, he laments the disorganisation of the time he
is dealing with (xix. 1, xxi. 25), and yet describes Israel to
us as existing in a religious centralisation, such as demonstrably
was never attained in the earlier life of the nation, but only
came about as a consequence of the exile, and is the distinctive
mark of Judaism.
As this narrative is not one of those included in the
Deuteronomistic scheme of the Book of Judges, there may be a
question whether it presupposes the Deuteronomic law only, or the
priestly law as well. Its language has most points of contact
with Deuteronomy; but one extremely important expression and
notion, that of "the congregation of the children of Israel,"
points rather to the Priestly Code. The same may be said of
Phinehas ben Eleazar ben Aaron (xx. 28). The latter, however,
occurs but once, and that in a gloss which forms a very awkward
interruption between "and the children of Israel inquired of
Jehovah," and the word "saying" which belongs to that phrase.
We have also to remark that there is no mention of the tabernacle,
for which there is no room in addition to Mizpeh (p. 256),
so that the principal mark of the Priestly Code is wanting.
It is only in preparation, it has not yet appeared: we are still
standing on the ground of Deuteronomy, but the way is being
prepared for the transition.
VII.I.3. Going a step further back from the last revision we meet
with an earlier effort in the same direction, which, however, is
less systematically worked out, in certain supplements and emendations,
which have here and there been patched on to the original narratives.
These may be due in part to the mere love of amplification or of
talking for talking's sake, and in so far we have no further
business with them here. But they originated partly in the
difficulty felt by a later age in sympathising with the religious
usages and ideas of older times. Two instances of this kind occur
in the history of Gideon. We read (vi. 25-32), that in the night
after his call Gideon destroyed, at the commandment of Jehovah,
the altar of Baal in Ophra, his native town, as well as the
Ashera which stood beside it; and that in place of it he built an
altar to Jehovah, and burned on it a yearling bullock, with the
wood of the Ashera for fuel. The next morning the people of Ophra
were full of indignation, and demanded that the author of the
outrage should be given up to them to be put to death; his
father, however, withstood them, saying, "Will ye contend for Baal?
Will ye save him? If he be a god, let Baal contend (Heb. Jareb
Baal) for himself." In consequence of this speech Gideon received
his second name of Jerubbaal. This conflicts with what is said in
an earlier part of the chapter. There Gideon has already made an
altar of the great stone under the oak of Ophra, where he saw
Jehovah sitting, and has offered upon it the first sacrifice, which
was devoured by flames breaking out of themselves, the Deity
Himself ascending in the flames to heaven. Why the two altars
and the two stories of their inauguration, both tracing their
origin to the patron of Ophra? They do not agree together, and
the reason is plain why the second was added. The altar of a
single stone, the flames bursting out of it, the evergreen tree,
the very name of which, Ela, seems to indicate a natural
connection with El, /1/--all this was in the eyes of a later
***************************************
1. )LH, )LWN, in Aramaic simply tree, in Hebrew the evergreen,
and in general the holy tree (Isaiah i. 29 seq.) mostly without
distinguishing the species. Not only are oaks and terebinths
included, but also palms. For the )LWN DBWRH at Bethel is
elsewhere called TMR; Elim derives its names from the 70 palms,
and the same may be the case with Elath on the Red sea.
***************************************
generation far from correct, indeed it was Baal-work. A desire
that the piety of Gideon should be above suspicion gave rise to
the second story, in which he erects an altar of Jehovah in place
of the former altar of Baal. How far this desire attained its end
we may best judge from the kindred effort to remove another
ground of offence, which lies in the name Jerubbaal. In accordance
with the occasion out of which the name is said to have arisen it
is said to mean, "Let Baal contend." Etymologically this
derivation is extremely far-fetched, and from every point of
view impossible: the name of a god is only assumed by those who
are his worshippers. In Hebrew antiquity Baal and El are
interchangeable and used indifferently; Jehovah Himself is spoken
of up to the times of the prophet Hosea as the Baal, i.e., the
lord. This is distinctly proved by a series of proper names in
the families of Saul and David, Ishbaal, Meribaal, Baaljada, to
which we may now add the name Jerubbaal given to the conqueror of
Midian. If then even in the time of the kings Baal was by no means
simply the antipode of Jehovah, whence the hostile relation of the
two deities, which Jerubbaal displays by the acts he does, although
he praises the great Baal by wearing his name? The view, also,
that the Ashera was incompatible with the worship of Jehovah,
does not agree with the belief of the earlier age; according to
Deuteronomy xvi. 21, these artificial trees must have stood often
enough beside the altars of Jehovah. The inserted passage itself
betrays in a remarkable manner that its writer felt this sort of
zeal for the legitimate worship to be above the level of the age
in question. We receive the impression that the inhabitants of
Ophra do not know their worship of Baal to be illegitimate, that
Gideon also had taken part in it in good faith, and that there had
never been an altar of Jehovah in the place before.
Of a somewhat different form is a correction which is to be found
at the close of the history of Gideon (viii. 22 seq.). After
the victory over the Midianites the Israelites are said to have
asked Gideon to be king over them. This he declined out of regard
to Jehovah the sole ruler of Israel, but he asked for the gold
nose-rings which had been taken from the enemy, and made of them
an image of Jehovah, an ephod, which he set up in Ophra to be
worshipped. "And all Israel went thither a-whoring after it, and
it became a snare to Gideon and to his house." Now the way in
which such a man acts in such a moment is good authority for the
state of the worship of Israel at the time, and not only so, but
we cannot impute it to the original narrator that he chose to
represent his hero as showing his thankfulness to the Deity by
the most gratuitous declension from His worship, as in fact crowning
His victory with an act of idolatry. This is seen to be the more
impossible when we consider that according to the testimony of
Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah, such images were even in the Assyrian
period a regular part of the belongings of the "houses of God"
not only in Samaria but in Judah as well. We have also to
remember that the contradiction between a human kingship and the
kingship of Jehovah, such as is spoken of in these verses, rests
upon theories which arose later, and of which we shall have more
to say. /1/ Studer will thus be correct in his assertion that the
******************************************
1. "The words of Gideon are only intelligible on the presupposition
that the rule of Jehovah had a visible representative prophet or
priest. But this was not the case in the period of the judges,
as Gideon's own history shows us." Vatke, p. 263. We see besides
from ix. 1 seq. that Gideon really was the ruler of Ephraim and
Manasseh.
*****************************************
old tradition could not see anything in Gideon's refusing the gold
for himself and dedicating it to God but a fine proof of his
unselfishness and piety, and that in viii. 22-27 we have a
secondary product, in which the original features of the story
are distorted so as to make them suit later tastes. The second
hand has unfortunately supplanted in this instance the work of
the first. The older narrative breaks off (viii. 21) with the
words: "Gideon took away the ornaments that were on the necks of
the camels of the kings." What he did with them we do not learn,
but naturally we must suppose that it was of them that he made
the ephod. According to the secondary passage, which begins
immediately after viii. 21, he used for this purpose the
nose-rings which the whole of Israel had taken from all the
Midianites, amounting in weight to 1700 shekels, besides the
ornaments of the kings and of their camels. The proportion is
similar to that between the 600 Danites in chap. xviii. and the
25,700 Benjamites in chap. xx., or between the 40,000 men of
Israel in v. 8, and the 400,000 in xx. 2.
VII.I.4. In the last place it is possible to trace even in the
original narratives themselves certain differences of religious
attitude which indicate to us unobtrusively and yet clearly that
tendency in the development of the tradition which reached its
end in the revision and ornamentation of which we have hitherto
been speaking. This is especially the case with regard to those
narratives which are preserved to us in a double form. These are
not frequent in Judges, but they do occur. A very simple case
of the kind is seen on comparing chap. iv. with chap. v.
The Canaanites again lift their heads under their great king
Sisera, and from their towns in the plains harass the hill
villages of the new settlers. Deborah unites the Hebrew tribes
for the contest. From the North and from the South the hosts of
Jehovah descend before our eyes towards Jezreel, the prophetess
Deborah at their head, the warrior Barak at her side. The conflict
takes place at the brook Kishon, and ends with the defeat of the
kings of Canaan. Sisera himself is killed in the flight by Jael,
the wife of a nomad Kenite. Such are the contents of the song in
chap. v. In the preceding narrative (chap. iv.) we should
expect to find a historical commentary on the song, but we find a
mere reproduction in which the special features of the story are
blurred and falsified. Instead of the kings of Canaan we have the
king of Canaan, as if Canaan had been a kingdom. Sisera, the head
of the Canaanite kings, is transformed into a mere general; the
oppression of the Hebrews is made general and indefinite. Jael
murders Sisera when he is Iying in a deep sleep by driving a
tent-peg into the ground through his temples. There is nothing
of this in the song: there he is drinking when she strikes the
blow, and is conceived as standing at the time, else he could
not bow down at her feet and fall, and lie struck dead where
he fell (ver. 27).
In the song the campaign is prepared with human means.
Negotiations are carried on among the tribes, and in the course of
these differences crop up. The lukewarmness or the swelling words
of some tribes are reproved, the energetic public spirit and
warlike courage of others praised. In the narrative, on the
contrary, the deliverance is the work of Jehovah alone; the men of
Israel are mere dummies, who show no merit and deserve no praise.
To make up for this, interest is concentrated on the act of Jael,
which instead of being an episode becomes the central point of the
whole narrative. Indeed it is announced as being so, for Deborah
prophesies to Barak that the glory of the conflict will not be his
but a woman's, into whose hand the enemy is to be sold; it is not
the hero, not human strength, that accomplishes what is done:
Jehovah shows His strength in man's weakness. And Barak's part in
the work is depreciated in yet another way. Deborah summons him
to go not to the battle, but to the holy hill of Tabor, where
Jehovah will bring about what is further to happen; he, however,
objects to this, and insists that the prophetess herself shall go
with him. This is regarded as a caprice of unbelief, because the
prophetess is thought to have exhausted her mission when she
transmitted the command of the Deity to His instrument: she has
appeared for no end but to make it known through her prophecy that
Jehovah alone brings everything to pass. In the song this is
different. There Barak is not summoned against his will; on the
contrary, he has a personal motive for taking up arms: "Arise,
Barak; take captive thy captors, thou son of Ahinoam." And the
prophetess has not only to prophesy; she works in a more
psychological manner; she is part of the battle, and inflames with
her song the courage of the fighting battalions: "Awake,
Deborah, awake, sing the song!" /1/ Throughout these variations of
**********************************************
1. Ver. 12 is a summons to begin the battle, and Deborah cannot
here be singing the song of triumph which celebrates its happy
issue. For a similar reason the translation given above, "take
captive thy captors," is the more natural and correct.
************************************************
the prose reproduction we feel that the rich colour of the events
as they occurred is bleached out of them by the one universal first
cause, Jehovah. The presence and energy of Jehovah are not wanting
in the song; they are felt in the enthusiasm which fills the Hebrew
warriors, and in the terror and panic which confound the prancing
vigour of the foe. But in the prose narrative, the Divine action
is stripped of all mystery, and mechanic prophecy finds no
difficulty in showing distinctly and with sober accuracy what the
part of the Deity in the history has been. But the more special
the intervention of Deity, the further is it from us; the more
precise the statements about it, the less do we feel it to be there.
There is another instance in the Book of Judges of the occurrence
of the same historical material in two different forms; it is the
story of Gideon of the Manassite house of Abiezer. Studer saw
that there is a break between viii. 3 and viii. 4, and that the
two stories, from the one of which we pass to the other at that
point, have to be understood separately; viii. 1-3 is the
conclusion of the first story. We have been told how, after the
success of the first attack on the Midianites, Gideon raised the
levy of all Israel for the pursuit, and how then the Ephraimites
seized the fords of the Jordan before the arrival of the flying
nomads and got the two leaders of the Midianites into their hands.
Now we hear in conclusion that the Ephraimites, elated by their
success began to find fault with Gideon, but that he pacified
their wrath by saying, "What have I done now in comparison of
you? Is not the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim better than the
vintage of Abiezer? God hath delivered into your hand the princes
of Midian, and what was I able to do in comparison of you?"
A domestic contention like this about the respective shares in
the victory could only arise when the victory had been gained,
when the strife with the enemy was fought out; the metaphor of
harvest and gleaning shows that the victory was complete and
all the fruits of it gathered in. Chapter viii. 1-3 concludes
the business, and the following narrative is not a continuation
of what has gone before, but a second version of the story in
which many of the circumstances are quite different. According
to vii. 23 seq. there was a great army on foot, but in viii. 4
seq. Gideon has only his own three hundred men with him. In
viii. 1-3 the vintage and the gleaning are over and the object
of the fighting is attained; but in viii. 4 seq. Gideon pursues
the enemy without any interruption, and when he asks the men of
Succoth and Penuel for bread for his wearied and hungry troops,
they inquire sarcastically whether he is already certain of
success, so that it should be necessary for them to espouse his
cause. The two chiefs who in the former account are called the
princes Oreb and Zeeb, and are already taken, are here called
the kings Zebah and Zalmunna, and are not taken yet. Unfortunately
the beginning of viii. 4 seq. is not preserved, and we cannot make
out whether the pursuit in which we find Gideon here engaged was
preceded by an action. Such a supposition is not exactly impossible,
yet the distance to which the nomads had carried their booty, and
their carelessness in camp, make it more likely that the occurrence
was like that in 1Samuel xxx. This, however, makes no difference as
to the particulars with regard to which the two narratives conflict
with each other.
But how did the difference arise? This we shall best learn by
comparing the beginnings of the two stories. We remarked that the
second, as it stands, wanted a beginning, but what is wanting may
be to some extent supplied from what follows. According to viii.
4 seq., Gideon's aim is to get hold of the two kings of the
Midianites: these appear all through as the particular enemies
whom he is pursuing: as to the rest of the Midianites he is more
or less indifferent. And the reason, as we learn from viii. 18
seq., is that the two kings had slain his brothers at Tabor; it
is to take vengeance for them that he sets out to pursue the
slayers, and does not rest till they are in his hand. It is the
duty of blood-revenge which causes him to take the war-path with
his household, unconcerned by the disproportion in numbers
between his followers and theirs: it is the powerful sentiment of
family which sets him in motion and causes him to become, as it
were incidentally, the liberator of Israel from the spoilers. In
the first account (vi. 11-viii. 3) these natural motives have
completely disappeared, and others have taken their place which
are almost of an opposite character. Before anything has
happened, before the Midianites have made their yearly incursion,
Gideon, who expects nothing of the kind, is summoned by a
theophany to battle against them. When they arrive he is seized
by the Spirit and sets out against them. What is human in him
has no part in the act he is called to do; flesh and blood set
themselves against it. He is impelled by the direct impulse of
Jehovah, and here, of course, he goes forth in behalf of the
public interests of Israel, against the Midianites, not against
their princes personally. And accordingly everything possible is
done to cast the man into the shade behind the Deity. Gideon,
according to the second account a distinguished and royal man,
is in the first of a poor house and family; in the second story
he is remarkable for irrepressible energy, but here he is timid
and shrinking up to the last moment, and new miracles have
constantly to be wrought to encourage and strengthen him.
The 32,000 men with whom he takes the field he is ordered by
Jehovah to send away all but l,000 and again all but 300, "lest
Israel vaunt themselves against Me, and say, Mine own hand hath
saved me." The weapons with which the nocturnal attack of the 300
is made are torches, pitchers, and trumpets; the men have not a
hand left to hold swords (vii. 20); and the hostile army has
accordingly to do itself the work of its own destruction (vii.
22).
Few of the deviations of the religious version from the natural one
are not transparent; one of these few is the removal of the scene
to this side of the Jordan. Most of them are at once recognisable
as due to the process of glorification, illumination, and
religious inflation, by which the body of the tradition is
etherealised and the story lifted up into the region of the air.
For example, the company of Gideon at the main action, the attack
on the hostile camp, consists of 300 men in chap. vii. as well
as in chap viii.; but in chap. vii., to draw out the
significance of the small number, they are treated as the last
residuum of what was at first quite a considerable army; and this
gives rise to a long story. We may also remark that chap. vi.
begins with the relation in which the judge stood to the sanctuary
of his native town, while chap. viii. closes with this. In the
one case he discovers by a theophany, like the patriarchs in
Genesis, the sacredness of the altar-stone under the oak; in the
other he sets up, in far more realistic fashion, the plated image
(ephod) he has made of the golden ornaments of the Midianite
kings. History has to take account principally, if not
exclusively, of the natural version, which is dry in tone and lets
things speak for themselves, not overlaying the simple story with
the significance of its consequences. The relation, however, is
somewhat different from that which we found existing between
Judges iv. and v. Chapter vi. seq. is not based directly on
chap. viii., but was probably formed from independent oral
material Though the local colour is lively, the historical
reminiscences are extremely vague, and there has been a much
freer growth of legend than in Jud. iv., producing pictures of
greater art and more naivete. But in the field of miracle poetry
is manifestly earlier than prose.
In the case of those narratives which have come down to us in
double form, the difference of standpoint is unmistakable; but it
may also be perceived in cases where we have no direct parallels
to compare. How noticeably does the story of Abimelech differ,
say from that of Jephthah which follows it, in the rich detail of
its facts, and in the spontaneous interest it shows in the
secondary and subordinate links in the chain of events! There is
no gilding with a supernatural nimbus; facts are simply and
plainly set down such as they are; the moral is left to speak
for itself as the story goes on. In the Samson legends again we
find two souls united, as it were, in one body. Traits belonging
to the rough life and spirit of the people are wrought, especially
at the beginning and end of the narrative, into a religious
national form; yet the two stand in an inner contrast to each other,
and it is scarcely probable that the exploits of this grotesque
religious hero were at first conceived in the Spirit of Jehovah,
of which, in the story as we have it, they are the product. More
probably the religious way of telling the story was preceded
by a way considerably more profane; but we cannot now separate
the older stage from that which is more recent. We may also
remark that the contrast of historical and unhistorical is
obviously inapplicable to this case, and, moreover, is
unessential for the end we have in view. Only it may stand
as a general principle, that the nearer history is to its
origin the more profane it is. In the pre-Deuteronomic narratives,
the difference is to be recognised less in the _kind_ of piety than
in the _degree_ of it.
VII.II.
VII.II.1. The comprehensive revision which we noticed in the Book
of Judges has left its mark on the Books of Samuel too. As, however,
in this case the period is short, and extremely rich in incident,
and really forms a connected whole, the artificial frame- and
net-work does not make itself so much felt. Yet it is by no
means wanting, as the dates of themselves indicate, whose place in
the chronological system was shown above. It is worthy of notice
how very loosely these are fitted into their context. In 1Samuel
iv. 18 seq. we read:
"And when the messenger made mention of the ark of God, Eli fell
backwards off his seat, and his neck brake, and he died, for he
was an old man and heavy, and _he judged Israel forty years_;
and when his daughter-in-law, the wife of Phinehas, who was with
child, heard the tidings," etc.
The statement of the date is not altogether inappropriately
dragged in, indeed, yet it is easy to see that it is dragged in.
In 2Samuel ii. 8-13 we read:
"Abner, the captain of Saul's host, took Ishbaal the son of Saul,
and brought him over the Jordan to Mahanaim, and made him king
over Gilead and Geshur, and Jezreel, and Ephraim, and Benjamin,
and all Israel. _Ishbaal was forty years old when he began to
reign over lsrael, and he reigned two years_. But the house of
Judah followed David. And the time that David was king in
Hebron was seven years and six months. And Abner and the servants
of Ishbaal went out from Mahanaim to Gibeon, and Joab with the
servants of David went out to meet him."
The words in italics <_..._> manifestly interrupt the connection;
and with regard to Ishbaal's dates we have also to remark that from
what we learn of him elsewhere he was, in the first place, still
in the years of pupilage, and in the next must have reigned as long
in Mahanaim as Oavid in Hebron. The number two connected with his
reign is to be explained as in the case of Saul (1Samuel xiii. 1):
_Saul was...years old when he began to reign, and he reigned two
years over Israel_. In this verse, which is not found in the LXX,
the number for the years of his life is wanting; and originally
the number for the years of his reign was left out too: the _two_
is quite absurd, and has grown out of the following word for year,
which in Hebrew has a somewhat similar appearance.
In company with the chronological formulas, we find also the
religious (1Samuel vii. 2-4).
"While the ark abode in Kirjath-jearim, it was twenty years;
and all the house of Israel came together after Jehovah. And
Samuel spake unto the whole house of Israel, saying: 'If ye do
return to Jehovah with all your hearts, then put away the strange
gods and the Astartes from among you, and prepare your hearts unto
Jehovah, and serve Him only; and He will deliver you out of the
hand of the Philistines.' And the children of Israel did put away
the Baals and Astartes, and served Jehovah only."
We are not told, in what precedes this passage, of any act of
declension from Jehovah, and according to chap. iv. the Israelites
showed no want of faith in Jehovah in the unfortunate battle with
the Philistines. This taking for granted that the yoke of a
foreign rule was laid on them as a punishment for their sins is
characteristic. A further example occurs in the speech of Samuel
(1Samuel. xii.), which, as the introduction to the time of the
kings, may be compared with Judges ii., the introduction to the
time of the judges. "Stand still that I may reason with you before
Jehovah of all the righteous acts of Jehovah with which He did
right to you and to your fathers! When Jacob was come into
Egypt, your fathers cried to Jehovah, and He sent Moses and Aaron
and brought your fathers out of Egypt and made them dwell in this
land. And when they forget Jehovah their God, He sold them into
the hand of Sisera, captain of the host of Hazor, and into the
hand of the Philistines, and the Moabites, and they fought
against them. And they cried unto Jehovah, and said, We have
sinned, because we have forsaken Jehovah and have served Baal and
Astarte, but now deliver us out of the hand of our enemies and we
will serve Thee. And Jehovah sent Jerubbaal, and Barak, and
Jephthah, and Samuel, and delivered you out of the hand of your
enemies on every side, and ye dwelled safe. And when ye saw that
Nahash the king of the children of Ammon came against you, ye said
unto me, Nay, but a king shall reign over us, when Jehovah your God
is your king. Now therefore behold the king whom ye have desired;
behold, Jehovah has set a king over you. If ye will hear Jehovah
and serve Him and obey His voice, and not rebel
against the commandment of Jehovah, good: but if ye rebel against
the commandment of Jehovah, then shall the hand of Jehovah be
against you as it was against your fathers."
It is the familiar strain: rebellion, affliction, conversion,
peace, Jehovah the keynote, and the first word and the last.
The eye does not dwell on the details of the story; the gaps in
the tradition are turned to account as well as its contents, which
are concentrated at so few points. Details are regarded only as
they bear on the whole; the periods are passed in review in a broad
and general style, and the law enunciated which connects them with
one another. In doing this Samuel seems to presuppose in his
hearers a knowledge of the biblical history in a distinct form;
and he even speaks without hesitation of his own historical
significance. The hearers are bidden to look back upon a period
in the living movement of which they themselves are standing, as
if it were a dead past. As they are thus lifted up to the height
of an objective contemplation of themselves and their fathers,
in the end the result which was to be expected takes place:
they become conscious of their grievous sin. Confronted with
the Deity they have always an uneasy feeling that they deserve
to be punished.
VII.II.2. The Deuteronomist revision asserts itself, it is true,
only in these two places, or rather this one place; but this
is the principal epoch in the book--the transition to the monarchy
which is associated with the name of Samuel. And on this account
the revision here acts the more trenchantly; it is not only an
addition to give a new flavour to the older tradition; it changes
the nature of the tradition entirely. For the passages we have
just quoted from it are merely fragments of a considerable
connected historical scheme. The first piece of this scheme, vii.
2-17, first claims our attention. After summoning the children of
Israel to repentance (vii. 2-4), Samuel convokes an assembly of
them at Mizpeh, near Jerusalem, in order to entreat for them that
the Philistine affliction may be turned away. This measure is of
course closely connected with the previously-mentioned abolition
of idolatry: for, after the guilt has ceased, the punishment also
must be removed. They assemble, draw water to pour it out before
Jehovah, fast, and confess their sins, at Mizpeh. When the
Philistines hear this, they are on the spot the very same day
and fall upon the assembly at its prayers. Samuel, however,
sacrifices a sucking lamb and cries for help to Jehovah, and the
engagement takes place while he is so occupied. Jehovah thunders
terribly against the Philistines and throws them into disorder, so
that they are forced to yield, and are pursued to a great
distance. And the Philistines, this is the end of the narrative,
were humbled and came no more into the coasts of Israel; and the
hand of Jehovah was against the Philistines all the days of
Samuel, and the cities which the Philistines had taken from Israel
were recovered; Ekron and Gath and their coasts did Israel take
from the Philistines, and there was peace between Israel and the
Amorites.
The mere recapitulation of the contents of this narrative makes us
feel at once what a pious make-up it is and how full of inherent
impossibilities: to think of all that is compressed into the
space of this one day! But we have also to remark the utter
contradiction of the whole of the rest of the tradition. In the
history which follows we find the domination of the Philistines
by no means at an end; not only do they invade the Israelite
territory several times in Samuel's lifetime, they are in
possession of the land of lsrael, and one of their governors lives
at Gibeah in the midst of Benjamin. The struggle with them is the
true and real origin and task of the monarchy. The writer had no
idea that Samuel had discharged this labour and won this victory
already, and had even "restored " Ekron and Gath. On the contrary,
the yoke of the Philistines lay most heavily on Israel just in
his days. There cannot be a word of truth in the whole narrative.
Its motives, however, are easily seen. Samuel is a saint of the
first degree (Jeremiah xv. 1), and in the theocracy, i.e., in the
religious community such as ancient Israel is represented to have
been, cut to the pattern of Judaism, such a man must take his
place at the head of the whole. His influence must have prevailed
to exclude idolatry and unfaithfulness to Jehovah on the part of
the people; and the general character of the time must on the
whole have answered to the type he set before it. But here a very
unpleasant difficulty suggests itself. If the fact of Samuel being
at the head is sufficient guarantee that all was as it should be
within the state, how can there have been such great pressure
externally, so as to endanger the very existence of the people?
If men do their part, how can Jehovah fail to do His? On the
contrary, it must be believed that the righteousness which
prevailed within had its counterpart in the external vindication
of His people by Jehovah. Even under Samuel the Philistines were
with God's help driven across the border, and as long as he lived
they were not seen within it again. The piety of a praying
assembly was suitably acknowledged by Jehovah, who dropped into
its lap a success such as in after times the sword of warlike
kings sought long and in vain to achieve.
But this example of history corrected does not stand alone, and
becomes completely intelligible only when taken in connection
with the similar pieces which belong to it. 1Samuel vii. is
continued in chap. viii., and chap. viii. again in x. 17-xii.
25. Samuel, after setting the land free from foreign tyranny,
conducts a quiet and successful reign till old age comes upon him.
His sons, however, whom he has made his assessors, do not walk in
his steps; and the elders of Israel make this the occasion to ask
him to give them a king. But this is a mere pretext for their
sinful desire to shake off the divine rule and to be like the
heathen round about them. Samuel is extremely indignant at their
ingratitude, but is directed by Jehovah to comply with their
request.
"They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected
Me, that I should not reign over them; according to all the works
that they have done since the day that I brought them up out of
Egypt, wherewith they have forsaken Me and served other gods. so
do they also unto thee."
It is in vain that Samuel exhibits to them an alarming catalogue
of the rights of the king: they are not to be moved from their
determination, and he accordingly summons a general convention of
the people at Mizpeh (viii. 22, x. 17). There, after the
opening lecture, lots are drawn for the king, and Saul is chosen,
whereupon Samuel has still to write down the law of the kingdom and
lay it up before Jehovah. The people are then dismissed; "and
Saul also went home to Gibeah, and with him the warriors whose
heart God had touched, but the children of Belial despised him,
and said 'How shall this man save us!'"
But Saul is at this point only king _de jure_; he does not become
king _de facto_ until after he has proved himself, chap. xi. After
an interval of a month (x. 27 LXX) the men of Jabesh, besieged by
the Ammonites and in great straits, send messengers throughout
Israel to implore speedy assistance, since in seven days they
have to surrender to their enemies and each of them to lose his
right eye. The messengers come to the town of Saul, Gibeah in
Benjamin, and tell their message before the people; the people
lift up their voices and weep. Saul meanwhile comes from the
field with a yoke of oxen, and, observing the general weeping,
asks what has happened. The story is told him, and at once the
Spirit of God comes upon him and his anger is kindled greatly;
he hews in pieces his oxen and sends the pieces throughout Israel
with the summons: Whoever does not come forth to the battle, so
shall it be done to his oxen! And the fear of Jehovah falls on
the people, and they go out as one man and relieve the besieged
town. Hereupon "the kingdom is renewed" for Saul at Gilgal, and
only now does Samuel abdicate his government, in the long speech
(chap. xii.) a considerable portion of which was given above.
That chap. xi. is now an integral part of this version of the
history is clear from xii. 12, and also from xi. 12-14. But it
was not originally designed for this connection. For we hear
nothing of the warriors who according to x. 26 were in company
with Saul; it is not on his account that the messengers of Jabesh
came to Gibeah. When the supposed king comes home from ploughing,
nothing is done to indicate that the news concerns him specially:
no one tells him what has happened, he has to ask the reason of
the general weeping. He summons the levy of Israel not in virtue
of his office as king, but in the authority of the Spirit, and it
is owing to the Spirit acting on the people that he is obeyed.
Only after he has showed his power and defeated the Ammonites do
the people make him king (xi. 15); the "renewal" of the kingdom
(xi. 14), after a month's interval, is a transparent artifice of
the author of viii. 10, 1) seq. to incorporate in his own narrative
the piece which he had borrowed from some other quarter: the verses
xi. 12-14 are due to him.
Chapter xi. stood originally in connection with the other
narrative of the elevation of Saul (ix. 1-X. 16). Hero Saul
first appears engaged in searching for strayed she-asses. After
a vain search of several days he arrives in the neighbourhood
of Ramah, and at the suggestion of his servant applies for
information as to the asses to a seer there, to Samuel. His
approach has been announced to the seer by Jehovah the day
before: "To-morrow I will send to thee a man out of the land of
Benjamin, and thou shalt anoint him to be ruler over My people
Israel; he shall save them from the Philistines." He was
accordingly expecting him, and had instituted a sacrificial feast
on the bamah for him even before he arrived. At this moment
Samuel has gone down to the town between the sacrificial act and
the meal which followed it, and just as he is going back to his
guests he meets in the gate Saul, who is asking for him, and at a
whisper from Jehovah he recognises in him his man. He takes him up
with him to the bamah, reassures him about the asses, and then at
once tells him to what high things he is called, and gives him
convincing proofs that he had reckoned on his presence at the feast
as the guest of the occasion. He then gives him lodgings for the
night, and accompanies him on his way next morning. The servant is
sent on a little way before, Samuel stands still and anoints Saul,
for a sign that he is chosen by Jehovah to be the king and deliverer
of Israel, and in conclusion instructs him that, when the opportunity
for action comes, he is to use it, in the consciousness that God
is with him. On his way home three signs come to pass which the
seer had announced to him. He is thus assured that all that was
said to him was true; his heart is changed by degrees till he
cannot contain himself; on his arrival at Gibeah his acquaintances
are struck with his strange demeanour, but he does not disclose
even to his most intimate friend at home what Samuel had said to
him, but waits for the things that shall come to pass.
This is the point arrived at in x. 16. It is clear that thus far
no conclusion has yet been reached: the seed that is sown must
spring up, the changed spirit must produce its effects. And this
requirement is abundantly satisfied if chap. xi. is regarded as
immediately continuing the story from x. 16. After about a
month, the opportunity presents itself for Saul to act, which
Samuel had bidden him to look for. While others are weeping at
the disgrace which threatens an Israelite town at the hands of
the Ammonites, he is filled with the Spirit and with rage,
the arrow is still in his heart from that conversation, and he
now does "what his hand finds to do." The result is a great
success; the word of the seer finds its fulfilment in the most
natural way in the world.
If chap. xi. belongs originally to the narrative of ix. 1.-x. 16,
it follows at once that the other sections are dependent and
later. But what is the inner relation of the one version to the
other? They coincide in their ideas here and there. In the one
story Saul seeks the asses and finds the crown, in the other he
hides himself among the stuff and is drawn forth king. In the one
he is called by the seer, in the other he is chosen by lot--the
divine causality operative in both cases. But how the idea is
exaggerated at the later stage, and how nakedly it is put forward!
And if there is this similarity of view, yet the deviation of the
secondary version from the original is much more striking than
the resemblance. For its tendency we are prepared by chapter
vii. Samuel has set his countrymen free from their enemies, and
ruled over them afterwards in righteousness and prosperity; why
then should they desire a change in the form of government? They
have just as much and as little reason for desiring this as for
the falling away from Jehovah, which also is a periodical
craving on their part, whenever they have had some years' rest:
it is the expression of the deep-seated heathenism of their nature.
That is the account of chapter viii. with what belongs to it.
Chapter ix. seq., however, gives quite a different account. Here,
at the end of the period of the judges, Israel is not at the
summit of power and prosperity, but in a state of the deepest
humiliation and the means of saving the people from this state is
seen in the monarchy alone. And this difference is closely
connected with another as to the view taken of the authority of
Samuel. In chap. viii. as in chap. vii. he is the vicegerent
of Jehovah, with unlimited authority. He feels the institution of
the monarchy to be his own deposition, yet the children of Israel
by no means rebel against him; they come to him to ask him for
a king. He might have refused the request; he might also have
given them a ruler according to his own good pleasure, but as a
correct theocrat he leaves the decision to Jehovah. At the end he
solemnly lays down the government he has hitherto carried on, and
hands it over to his successor. The latter is superior to him in
point of title, but not in point of power: indeed in the latter
respect he is rather inferior to Samuel, being a mere earthly
prince (xii. 23 seq.). But how do matters stand in chap. ix. seq.?
Here Samuel is quite a stranger to Saul, who knows neither his
name nor his residence. Only his servant has heard of Samuel,
who enjoys a high reputation as a seer in his own neighbourhood.
What we are to think of when we read of a seer of that period,
we are clearly and circumstantially informed: for Samuel is
consulted as to the whereabouts of strayed she-asses, and a fee
of a quarter of a silver shekel is tendered to him for his advice.
This seer stands, it is clear, above the average of those who
practiced the same calling; yet his action on the history is quite
within the limits of what was possible, say to Calchas: it
exhibits not a trace of the legislative and executive power of
a regent of the theocracy. He does not bring help; he only
descries help and the helper. The very event which, according
to chap. viii. seq., involved the removal of Samuel from his
place and his withdrawal to the background of the history, is
here the sole basis of his reputation: the monarchy of Saul,
if not his work, is his idea. He announces to the Benjamite his
high calling, interpreting in this the thoughts of the man's own
heart (ix. 19). With this his work is done; he has no commission
and no power to nominate his successor in the government.
Everything else he leaves to the course of events and to the
Spirit of Jehovah which will place Saul on his own feet.
In the great difference which separates these two narratives we
recognise the mental interval between two different ages. In the
eyes of Israel before the exile the monarchy is the culminating
point of the history, and the greatest blessing of Jehovah. It
was preceded by a period of unrest and affliction, when every man
did what was right in his own eyes, and the enemies of Israel
accordingly got everything their own way. Under it the people
dwell securely and respected by those round about; guarded by
the shelter of civil order, the citizen can sit under his own
vine and his own fig-tree. That is the work of the first two
kings, who saved Israel from his spoilers, and gave him power
and rest. No difference is made between them in this respect:
the one commenced the work which the other completed (1Samuel
ix. 16, xiv. 48; 2Samuel iii. 18, xix. 9). Before them there was
no breathing space left in the hard work of fighting, but now
there is time to think of other things. Even Deuteronomy,
which was written not long before the exile, regards the period
before the monarchy as a time of preparation and transition,
not to be counted complete in itself: Israel must first acquire
fixed seats and a settled way of living, and then Jehovah also
will choose a seat for Himself and make known His desires with
regard to the cultus. David brought things so far that the
people had room and struck firm roots into the ground, and
ceased to tremble before their enemies, who had kept them on the
strain from the beginning, and all the days of the judges; and
under his successor the time came when the temple could be built
and higher interests receive attention. That Hebrew antiquity
knew nothing of any hostility or incompatibility between the
heavenly and the earthly ruler is plain from the title Anointed
of Jehovah, and from the hope of the prophets, whose ideal future
would be incomplete without a human king. The ancient Israelites
were as fully conscious as any other people of the gratitude
they owed to the men and to the institutions by whose aid they
had been lifted out of anarchy and oppression, and formed into an
orderly community, capable of self-defence. Of this the Books of
Samuel afford the most eloquent testimony. /1/
*****************************************
l In Balaam's view of the happy future of Israel (Numbers xxiii.
seq.), the monarchy is spoken of as one of Israel's chief
blessings. Generally (xxiii. 21): "Jehovah his God is with
him, and the shout of a king is among them." With reference to
Saul (xxiv. 7): "And his king triumphs over Agag. and his
kingdom shall be exalted." To David (xxiv. 17): "I see him,
though not now; I behold him, though not nigh: there rises (ZRX)
a star out of Jacob and a rod out of Israel, and smites in pieces
the temples of Moab and the skull of all the sons of Seth: and Edom
also becomes a conquest." According to Deuteronomy xxxiii. 4, 5,
the monarchy and the Torah are the two great gifts of God's grace
to Israel.
******************************************
The position taken up in the version of 1 Samuel vii. viii. x. 17
seq. xii., presents the greatest possible contrast to this way
of thinking. There, the erection of the monarchy only forms a
worse stage of backsliding from Jehovah. There can be no progress
beyond the Mosaic ideal; the greater the departure from it the
greater the declension. The capital sin of placing a human ruler
on the throne of Jehovah makes even the period of the judges
appear not quite black. Dark as the colours are with which that
period is generally painted, it held fast to the original form of
the theocracy, and so appears somewhat brighter: at last indeed,
to heighten the contrast, it is represented as a splendid age.
Under the rule of Samuel, everything was as it should be. Should
we ask, _how_ were things then? what was exactly the nature of
the theocratic constitution? we receive, it is true, no
satisfactory answer to the question. We might draw conclusions
with regard to the body from the head: but what sort of an idea
can we form of the position of Samuel? As he appears in these
chapters, we entirely fail to dispose of him in any of the
categories applicable to the subject; he is not a judge, not
a priest, not a prophet,--if at least we use these words with
their true historical meaning. He is a second Moses? Yes, but
that does not tell us much. So much only is clear, that the
theocracy is arranged on quite a different footing from the
kingdoms of this world, and that it amounts to a falling away
into heathenism when the Israelites place a king at their head
like other nations, and he keeps courtiers and ministers, officers
and soldiers, horses and chariots. It is accordingly a spiritual
community: the spiritual character of the regent places this
beyond doubt. Samuel admonishes the people to give up idolatry;
he presides at the great day of repentance at Mizpeh, which forms
an epoch in the sacred history; and Jehovah can refuse nothing to
his prayers and cries (xii. 1 7). "God forbid," he says in
taking leave of them (xii. 23), "that I should cease to pray for
you and teach you the good way." Such is his position: and the
citizens of the theocracy have the corresponding duty of
cultivating the worship of Jehovah, and not withdrawing themselves
from the guidance of the representative of Deity. They do not
need to trouble themselves about means for warding off the attacks
of their enemies; if they fast and pray, and give up their sins,
Jehovah hurls back the foe with His thunder and lightning, and so
long as they are pious He will not allow their land to be
invaded. All the expenses are then naturally superfluous by
which a people usually safeguards it own existence. That this
view is unhistorical is self-evident; and that it contradicts the
genuine tradition we have seen. The ancient Israelites did not
build a church first of all: what they built first was a house
to live in, and they rejoiced not a little when they got it
happily roofed over (xi. 15). But we have still to add, in
conclusion, that the idea here before us can only have arisen in
an age which had no knowledge of Israel as a people and a state,
and which had no experience of the real conditions of existence in
these forms; in other words. It is the offspring of exilic or
post-exilic Judaism. At that time the nation was transformed into
a religious community, whose members were at liberty to
concentrate themselves on what they held to be the great business
of life, worship and religiousness, because the Chaldeans or the
Persians had relieved them of all care for worldly concerns. At
that time, accordingly, the theocracy _existed_, and it is from
that time that it is transported in an idealised form to early
times. The material basis on which the theocracy rested in fact,
namely, the foreign domination, is put out of sight, and it is
counted heathenism in the old Israelites that they cared for the
external conditions of their national existence, that they are a
people in the full sense of the word, and seek to maintain
themselves as such with the weapons which are found necessary in
the work-a-day world. It naturally never came into the heads of
these epigoni to conceive that the political organisation and
centralisation which the monarchy called into being provided the
basis for the organisation and centralisation of the worship, and
that their church was merely a spiritualised survival of the
nation. What is added to Moses is taken away from the monarchy.
One more point has to be noticed. The chapters vii. viii. x. 17
seq. xii. betray a close relationship with Judges xix.-xxi.,
not only by their general tendency, but by a geographical
detail in which the two passages agree. It is only here that
Mizpeh, near Jerusalem, occurs as the place of meeting of all
Israel; we find no further mention of the place in the whole
period of the judges and the kings. Only after the destruction
of Jerusalem is it mentioned, and there as the centre of the new
Jewish community instituted by the Chaldeans (Jeremiah xl. seq.) as
the substitute of the old capital. It appears once more, and in a
similar character, in I Maccabees iii. 46 seq. at a time when the
temple of Jerusalem was in the hands of the Syrians, and the Jews
could not get to it. The Mizpeh of Judges xx., 1Samuel vii. 10,
is probably the same as that of Jeremiah xl. seq., and intended to
be, like these, in place of Jerusalem, the only legitimate
sanctuary, which, however, did not exist at that early time.
This is a further proof of the post-Deuteronomic and Jewish origin
of these narratives, but at the same time an indication that, with
every inclination to the views of the Priestly Code, the writer
yet had not that code before him. For in that work the projection
of Jerusalem into the period before Solomon is carried out in
quite a different way: the tabernacle renders Mizpeh superfluous.
It has also to be remarked that the rite of pouring out water
(1Samuel vii.) is foreign to the Priestly Code.
VII.II.3. The relation of Saul to Samuel is a subject which lends
itself readily to general views, and the development of the
tradition is visible in it in other particulars besides those we
have mentioned. Taking the view of 1Samuel vii. viii. xii. as
the lower limit, the narrative nearest in character is the story
about Samuel contained in an insertion in chap. xiii. After Saul
is made king at Gilgal by the levy with which he relieved Jabesh,
he selects from it a body of men who camp with him and Jonathan
at Gibeah and the neighbouring Michmash: and Jonathan, by killing
the officer at Gibeah, gives the signal for battle with the old
enemy of his race. The Philistines advance, and take up a position
to the north of Gibeah, with only a deep valley between them and
the Israelites. But Saul, we hear all at once, xiii. 7 (cf. ver. 4)
was yet in Gilgal, and waited seven days for Samuel, according
to the set time the latter had appointed; but Samuel did not come,
and the warriors began to scatter. As he was himself offering the
sacrifice without which no campaign could be commenced, Samuel
arrived, and at once opened upon him. Saul defended his act
with great force: the people were scattering, and Samuel had not
come at the appointed time, and as the Philistines had advanced
close up to Gibeah, he had found it impossible to delay longer,
and had offered the sacrifice in order to advance against them.
To all this Samuel's only answer was:
"Thou hast done foolishly; if thou hadst kept the commandment of
Jehovah, He would have established thy kingdom for ever, but
now thy kingdom shall not continue; Jehovah has sought Him a man
after His own heart, and appointed him to be ruler over His people,
because thou hast not kept that which Jehovah commanded thee."
So he said, and walked off; but Saul went with the army from Gilgal
to Gibeah. At Gibeah, the following verse (xiii. 16) goes on,
abode Saul and Jonathan, and their men, when the Philistines
encamped in Michmash.
The change of place distinctly shows the whole passage about the
meeting of the king with the prophet at Gilgal (xiii. 7-15) to be
an insertion by a later hand. At the beginning of the narrative
Saul is at Gibeah (ver. 2, 3), and the Philistines seek him
there, and halt before the place because they meet with
resistance. All at once, at ver. 7, it is assumed without being
stated, that Saul had stayed at Gilgal since he was chosen king
till now, and had only now advanced from there against the
Philistines who were waiting for him before Gibeah. Verse 16,
however, gives us the impression that Saul had been posted at
Gibeah with his men for some time, when the Philistines took up
their camp over against them. Only in this way is justice done
to the contrasted participle of state (_sedentes_) and inchoative
perfect (_castrametati sunt_). And in the sequel the triumphant
continuation of the story, especially in chap. xiv., shows no
indication that the ominous scene in Gilgal weighed on the mind of
Saul, or of the people, or of the historian.
According to xiii. 7-15, Saul is to wait seven days for Samuel at
Gilgal. Here there is a reference to x. 8, where the seer says
to the future king, "Thou shalt go down before me to Gilgal, and
I will come after thee there to offer sacrifices; seven days
shalt thou tarry till I come and show thee what thou shalt do."
This verse is condemned by other arguments than its connection
with xii. 7-15. Samuel's object at this point, according to x.
I-7, is to overcome the reluctance of the Benjamite who had gone
forth to seek his asses, to undertake the high calling announced
to him, and to inspire him with faith and confidence,--not to give
him unintelligible directions as to what he is to do first when he
has actually become king, and how long he has to wait for the
seer at Gilgal. The schoolmaster tone of x. 8 is particularly
out of place after the preceding words of ver. 7, that, when the
three signs have come to pass, Saul is to do what his hand finds,
because God is with him. This is surely giving him perfect
freedom of action, and for the reason that God's Spirit is working
in him, which "bloweth where it listeth," and suffers no
interference from any authority. /1/
*************************************
1. It is also clear that the writer of x. 8, xiii. 7-15 cannot
possibly have found Samuel in Gilgal in chap. xi. before making
him go there in chap. xiii. We have already seen xi. 12-14 to
be a later addition; the name of Samuel must be interpolated
in xi.7, too. In fact in xi. 15 the people, i.e., the army,
acts quite of itself even in our present text. Hence it follows
also, that x. 8, xiii. 7-15 are older than vii. viii. x. 17 seq.
xii.
***************************************
This insertion is based on an older account of the breach between
Samuel and Saul in 1Samuel xv. Here also the matter of dispute is
a sacrifice, and Gilgal is the scene; and this alone serves to
explain how Gilgal is adhered to in xiii. 7-15 in spite of all
impossibility, as being the right and necessary place for the
occurrence. Jehovah, by the mouth of Samuel, commands the king
to devote the Amalekites to destruction because of an act of
treachery they had committed against Israel in ancient times,
and to spare no living thing. Saul accordingly makes war on the
Amalekites and defeats them; but he does not carry out the
proscription entirely, as he spares the best of their cattle and
their king Agag, whom he takes prisoner. At Gilgal, where the
victory is celebrated before Jehovah, he is called to account for
this by Samuel, and states that he intended the booty for a
sacrifice to Jehovah. His statement, however, makes no
impression. "Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to
hearken than the fat of rams: behold, rebellion is as the sin
of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry and teraphim.
Because thou hast rejected the word of Jehovah, He also hath
rejected thee."
The king acknowledges his guilt, and tries to pacify Samuel;
but the latter turns from him in anger, and when Saul lays
hold of him, his mantle tears.
"Jehovah hath torn the kingdom of Israel from thee this day,
and given it to one better than thee; and the Truthful One of
Israel will not lie nor repent; for He is not a man, that He
should repent."
Yet at Saul's entreaty that he would at least not refuse
to honour him before the people, Samuel takes part in the
sacrifice, and even begins it by hewing Agag in pieces before
Jehovah. Then they part, never to see each other again; but
Samuel mourns for Saul, that Jehovah had repented of having made
him king over Israel. There is another narrative intimately
connected with this one in subject and treatment, thought and
expression, namely, that of the witch of Endor. When Saul, shortly
before the battle in which he fell, surveyed the hostile army, he
was seized with anxiety and terror. He inquired of Jehovah, but
received no answer, neither by dreams, nor by the ephod, nor by
prophets. In his extremity he was driven into the arms of a
black art which he had formerly persecuted and sought to
extirpate. By night and in disguise, with two companions, he
sought out a woman at Endor who practiced the raising of the dead,
and after reassuring her with regard to the mortal danger
connected with the practice of her art, he bade her call up
Samuel. She, on seeing the spirit ascending, at once perceives
that the man he had come up to converse with is the king himself;
she cries out loud, but allows herself to be reassured, and
describes the appearance of the dead person. Saul does not see
him, only hears him speak.
"Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up? Jehovah doeth to
thee as He spake by me: He rends the kingdom out of thy hand,
and gives it to another, because thou obeyedst not the voice of
Jehovah, nor executedst His fierce wrath upon Amalek; to-morrow
shalt thou and thy sons be with me, and Jehovah also shall deliver
the host of Israel into the hands of the Philistines."
At these words Saul falls all his length on the ground. He had
eaten nothing all the day before and all night; he is with
difficulty induced to take some food: then he rises up with his
men to go and meet his fate (1 Samuel xxviii. 3-25).
Comparing with this original the copy in xiii. 7-15, we are
struck, in the first place, with the placing of the rupture so
much earlier. Scarcely is Saul made king when he is deposed, on
the spot, at Gilgal. And for what reason? Samuel has fixed, in
a purely arbitrary fashion, the time he is to wait, and Saul waits,
and makes arrangements for departure only when the time has run out,
although the need is pressing; and for this he is rejected! It is
clear that Samuel has from the first felt towards him as a
legitimate prince feels to a usurper; he has arranged so as to
find an occasion to show unmistakably where they both stand.
Strictly speaking he did not find the occasion, Saul having
observed the appointed time; but the opinion is present, though
unexpressed, that the king was not entitled to sacrifice, either
before the expiry of the seven days or at any time: his sacrificing
is regarded as sacrilege. And thus the autonomous theocracy stands
all at once before our eyes, which no one thought of before Ezekiel.
We are reminded of the stories of Joash and Uzziah in the Chronicles.
The incidents in 1Samuel xv. xxviii. are similar, but the spirit
of the narrative is different and more antique. The rejection does
not come here with such mad haste, and we do not get the impression
that Samuel is glad of the opportunity to wash his hands of the
king. On the contrary, he honours him before the people, he
mourns that Jehovah has rejected him; and Saul, who never again
sees him alive, turns to him dead in the hour of his extremity,
and does not regard him as his implacable enemy. Again, in the
former case the king's offence is that he has too low an estimate
of the sacredness of sacrifice, and fails to regard the altar as
unapproachable to the laity: while in the latter case he is
reproached with attaching. to sacrifice far too high a value. In
the former case, in fine, the Deity and the representative of the
Deity act with absolute caprice, confront men stiffly with
commands of incredible smallness, and challenge them to opposition;
in the latter, the conduct of Samuel is not (supposing it to have
been the custom to devote enemies to destruction) unintelligible,
nor his demeanour devoid of natural spirit; he appeals not to an
irresponsible position, but to the manifest truth that obedience
is better than the fat of rams.
Not that chapters xv. and xxviii. belong to the original growth of
the tradition. In the case of xxviii. 3-25 it is easy to show
the insertion: the thread of xxviii. 1, 2, coming from chapter
xxvii. is continued at xxix. 1. According to xxviii. 4 the
Philistines have advanced as far as Shunem in Jezreel; in xxix. 1
they are only at Aphek in Sharon, and they do not go on to
Jezreel till xxix. 11. To prove an insertion in the case of
chap. xv. we might point to the fact that there is a direct
connection between xiv. 52 and xvi. 14; but this must be proved
somewhat circumstantially. Let it suffice, then, to say that in
the preceding narrative of Saul's history, the war with the
Amalekites appears in quite a different light (ix. 1-X. 16, xi. xiii.
xiv.; cf. also Numbers xxiv. 7). The occasion of it, according to
xiv. 48, lay in the needs of the time, and the object was the
very practical one of "saving Israel out of the hands of them
that spoiled them." There is nothing here to suggest that the
campaign was undertaken in consequence of a religious command,
to punish the Amalekites for an offence over which long ages had
passed, and information about which could only be gathered from
historical books dealing with the age of Moses. Both the
narratives, chap. xv. as well as chap. xxviii, are preludes of
events afterwards to happen. At chap. xvi. David appears upon
the scene; he is thenceforth the principal person of the story,
and thrusts Saul on one side. Chapter xv. is the prophetic
introduction to this change. The fact had been handed down that
Saul was chosen by Jehovah to be king. How was it possible that in
spite of this his rule had no continuance? Jehovah, who as a rule
does not change His mind, was mistaken in him; and Samuel, who
called the king, had now to his great sorrow to pronounce the
sentence of rejection against him. The occasion on which he does
this is evidently historical, namely, the festival of victory
at Gilgal, at which the captured leader of the Amalekites was
offered up as the principal victim. The sacrifice of Agag being
quite repugnant to later custom, it was sought to account for it
by saying that Saul spared the king, but Jehovah required his
death, and caused him to be hewn in pieces at the altar by
Samuel. The rest could easily be spun out of this; it is
superfluous to discuss how. Chapter xxviii., again, is related to
chap. xv. as the second step to the first. No proof is wanted to
show that this is the prophetic shadow cast before the fall of
Saul in his last fight with the Philistines. His turning to the
witch to call up to him the departed Samuel suggests in the most
powerful way his condition of God-forsakenness since Samuel
turned away from him. And, to conclude-the general colouring of
the hostile relation between Saul and Samuel is borrowed from the
actual relations which must have come to subsist between the
prophets and the kings, particularly in the kingdom of Samaria (I
Kings xiv. 7). In their treatment of this relation our
narratives manifestly take up the prophetic position; and the
doctrinal ideas of which they are made the vehicles clearly
show them to be prophetic conceptions.
VII.II.4. David is the first hero of Judah whom we meet with;
and he at once throws all others into the shade. His acts are
narrated to us in two detailed and connected works which are
mutually complementary. The first of these is contained in 1Samuel
xiv. 52-2 Sam viii 18, and in it we are circumstantially informed
how David rose to the throne. There follows his principal achievement
as king, the humiliation of the Philistines and the foundation of
Jerusalem, the work concluding with a short notice of other
remarkable circumstances. This narrative is preserved to us
complete, only not in the earliest form, but with many
interruptions and alterations. The second work, 2Samuel ix.-2Kings
ii. is mutilated at its commencement, but otherwise almost
completely intact, if 2Samuel xxi.-xxiv. be removed. It tells
chiefly of the occurrences at the court of Jerusalem in the later
years of the king, and carefully traces the steps by which
Solomon, whose birth, with its attendant circumstances, is
narrated at the outset, reached the throne over the heads of his
brothers Amnon, Absalom, and Adonijah, who stood before him. Both
works are marked by an essentially historical character. The
treatment is much more detailed, while not nearly so poetical as
in the history of Saul (1Samuel ix. seq.). There are no
exaggerations, such as xiv. 46 seq. The second is the better
work of the two, and frequently affords us a glance into the very
heart of events, showing us the natural occasions and human motives
which gave rise to the different actions. The point of view is,
however, the narrow one of Jerusalem; for example, the real
reasons of the revolt of the men of Judah under Absalom are
scarcely even hinted at. The leading sentiment of the writer,
there can be no doubt, is enthusiasm for David, but his weaknesses
are not concealed; the relations prevailing at his court, far from
edifying as they are, are faithfully reported, and the palace
intrigue which placed Solomon upon the throne is narrated with a
naivete which is almost malicious. The first work (1Samuel xvi.-
2Samuel viii.) gives a less circumstantial narrative, but follows
the thread of events not less conscientiously, and is based on
information little inferior to that of the second. The author's
partisanship is more noticeable, as he follows the style of a
biographer, and makes David the hero of the history from his very
first appearance, although king Saul is the ruling and motive power
in it. But Judaistic leanings were unavoidable, and they have
not gone so far as to transform the facts, nor indeed operated
in a different way or to a greater degree here than local
interest in the tribal hero, which is always the earliest motive
for narration, has done in other cases. This praise applies to
1Samuel xvi. seq., however, only so far as its original form goes.
It is different with the insertions, here very numerous, which
have crept into the older connection, or replaced a genuine piece
of the old story with a newer edition of it. In these the
tendency to idealise the founder of the dynasty of Judah has
worked creatively, and here we find rich materials for the history
of the tradition, in the rude style in which alone it is possible
as yet to construct that history. The beginning of the first work
especially is overgrown with later legendary formations.
David, known as a man of courage and prudence, and of a skilful
tongue, and recommended, moreover, by his skill on the harp, came
to the king's court and became his armour-bearer (xvi. 14-23).
He so approved himself in the war with the Philistines that Saul
advanced him step after step, and gave him his daughter in
marriage (xviii. 6 seq.). But the success and fame of the man of
Judah filled Saul with jealousy, and in one of his fits of frenzy
(to which x. 10 also shows him to have been subject) he threw his
javelin at David, who was seeking to drive away the evil spirit
by his playing (xix. 8-10). David agreed with Jonathan that it
was advisable for him to absent himself, but this only confirmed
the king's suspicions, which prompted him to destroy the priests
of Nob, because their head had provided David with food and
consulted the oracle for him (xxi 2-7, xxii. 6-23). The fugitive
himself Saul failed to lay hands on; he gathered round him his
own family and other desperate men, and became their leader in
the wilderness of Judah (xxii. 1-5, xxiii. 1-13, xxv. 2 seq.).
To escape the repeated persecutions of Saul, he at length passed
over to the country of the Philistines, and received the town of
Ziklag in Judah as a fief from the hands of the prince Achish
(xxvii. 1 seq.).
Such is the beginning of the history of David according to the
simple thread of the old narrative. The first accretion we
notice is the legend of the encounter of the shepherd boy with
Goliath (xvii. 1-xviii. 5), which is involved in contradiction
both with what goes before and with what follows it. According to
xvi. 14-23, David, when he first came in contact with Saul, was no
raw lad, ignorant of the arts of war, but "a mighty valiant man,
skilful in speech, and of a goodly presence;" and according to
xviii. 6 the women sang at the victorious return of the army,
"Saul has slain his thousands of the Philistines, and David his
tens of thousands," so that the latter was the leader of Israel
beside the king, and a proved and well-known man. Evidently
something of a different nature must originally have stood
between xvi. 23 and xviii. 6. Now the fate of the story of
Goliath (xvii. 1-xviii. 5) involves that of the story of the
anointing of David (xvi. 1-13), which is dependent on it
(xvi. 12, xvii. 42); and, as we have already decided that chapter
xv. is a secondary production, xiv. 52 joins on at once to xvi. 14.
In xviii. 6 seq., where we are told of the origin of Saul's
jealousy, several of the worst additions and interruptions are
wanting in the LXX, especially the first throwing of the javelin
(xviii. 9-11) and the betrothal to Merab (xviii. 17-19).
The insertions are most varied and confusing in the account of
the outbreak of the hostility of Saul and of David's flight
(chapters xix. xx). Chapter xix. 1-7, a pointless and artificial
passage, betrays its later origin by its acquaintance with chapter
xvii.; xviii. 29a (LXX) is continued at xix. 8. After Saul's
spear-cast David takes flight for the first time, but at verse 11
he is still at home, and makes his escape the second time with the
aid of feminine artifice, going to Samuel at Ramah, but to appear
in chap. xx. at Gibeah as before. The king remarks his absence
from table; Jonathan assures him of his father's favour, which,
however, David doubts, though he has no distinct evidence to the
contrary. When quite certain of the deadly hatred of the king,
David takes flight in earnest; in chapter xxi. seq. we find him
at Nob on his way to Judah, but at xxi. 10 he goes away afresh
from the face of Saul. It is evident that in reality and in the
original narrative the flight took place only once, and that it
must from the first have been directed to the place of refuge,
i.e., to Judah. This is enough to dispose of xix. 11-24: the
twentieth chapter is impossible in the connection, at least in
its present form, and in chapter xxi. verses 8-10 and 11-16 must
be left out. In the section which deals with the freebooter life
of David, chaps. xxiii-xxvii., considerable pieces have been added;
xxvii. 7-12 of course is one; but also the encounters of David with
his pursuers. There are two versions: the one, xxvi. 1-25, is
placed before chapter xxvii. on account of verse 19; the other,
xxiii. 14-xxiv. 22, is placed before chapter xxv. to avoid too near
a contact. There is a good deal of verbal coincidence between the
two, and we are entitled to regard the shorter and more pointed
version (chapter xxvi.) as the basis. But the sequence (xxvi. 25,
xxvii. 1) shows beyond a doubt that chapter xxvi. does not belong
to the original tradition. The process of inserting the additions
naturally was not completed without all sorts of editorial changes
in the older materials, e.g., xvi. 14.
Though proceeding from the same root, these offshoots are by no
means of the same nature, nor do they all belong to the same
stage of the process. Some of them are popular legends and
unconscious fictions. Of this nature is the story of Michal, who
takes the part of her husband against her father, lets him down in
the evening with a rope through the window, detains the spies for a
time by saying that David is sick, and then shows them the
household god which she has arranged on the bed and covered with
the counterpane (xix. 11-17). The scenes in which Saul and David
meet are of a somewhat different colour, yet we notice that the
conviction that the latter is the king of the future does not
interfere with the recognition of the former as the king _de facto_
and the anointed of Jehovah; Saul too appears not wicked, but
blinded. The secondary version (xxiii. 14 seq.) contains (not
to speak of the distinctly later insertion between verse 15 and
19), in addition to the touching features of the story, a
good-natured jest, telling how the two played hide-and-seek round a
hill, which took its name from the circumstance. These stories
present certain marks which serve to fix their date in the history
of the religion: one is, that the image in David's house is
spoken of quite simply; another, the expression in xxvi. 19,
"If Jehovah have stirred thee up against me, let Him accept an
offering, but if it be men, cursed be they before Jehovah,
because they have driven me out this day from the fellowship in
the land of Jehovah, and obliged me to serve other gods."
It is perhaps not by mere chance that this speech is wanting in
the parallel version, and that there is added in place of it a
formal act of recognition which Saul pays at the end to his
destined successor. As for the story of Goliath, it is also quite
artless, but its religious colouring is much more marked. The
speech with which David goes to meet the giant is characteristic on
this side (xvii. 4 seq.):
"Thou comest to me with a sword and with a spear, but I come unto thee
in the name of Jehovah of hosts, whom thou hast defied. This day will
He deliver thee into mine hand, that all the earth may know that there
is a God in Israel, and that this assembly (hqhl = Israel) may know that
Jehovah saveth not with sword and spear, for the battle is His."
This approaches to the religious language of the post-Deuteronomic
time. According to 2Samuel xxi. 19, Goliath of Gath, whose
spear-shaft was as thick as a weaver's beam, /1/ fought in the
********************************************
1. This expression occurs in I Samuel xvii., and shows this legend
to be dependent on 2Samuel xxi. xxiii., a collection of anecdotes
about heroes from the Philistine wars of David in the genuine short
popular style. Cf., on 1Chronicles xii., supra, p. 173.
********************************************
wars, not in Saul's time, but in that of his successor, and was
killed, not by a shepherd boy but by a warrior of Bethlehem
named Elhanan.
The theme of David and Jonathan has no doubt a historical basis,
but for us it is found only in second-hand versions. The story
of the farewell (chapter xx.) must be placed in this category.
Yet it appears to point back to an earlier basis, and the earlier
story may very possibly have belonged to the connection of the
original work. For the shooting of the arrow could only have a
meaning if it was impossible for the two friends to have an
interview. But as the story goes, they come together and speak
out freely what they have in their hearts, and so the dumb
signal is not only superfluous, but unintelligible and
meaningless. But if the most characteristic trait of the whole
story does not fit into it as it now stands, that is just saying
that the story has not come down to us in its true form.
Originally Jonathan only discharged the arrow, and called to his
boy where it lay; and David, hid in the neighbourhood of the
shooting range, heard in the call to the boy the preconcerted
signal. In calling that the arrow was nearer him or beyond him,
Jonathan was apparently telling the boy, but in reality telling
his friend, to come towards him or go farther away from him. The
latter was the case, and if so, the friends could not enter into
conversation; the tearful farewell then disappears, and the
sentimental speeches spoken before it in the same style, in which
Jonathan virtually admits that his father is right, and yet
decidedly espouses David's cause, disregarding the fact that David
will deprive him of his inheritance. /2/
*********************************************
2. Only in one direction does he set limits to his self-denial:
he makes the future king solemnly promise to spare his family.
Here manifests itself an interest belonging to the time of the
narrator. The oriental custom according to which the new ruler
extirpates the preceding dynasty, was not systematically carried
out by David, and a special exception was made in favour of a son
left by Jonathan. "All my father's house," says Meribaal (2Samuel
xix. 28), "were dead men before my lord the king yet thou didst set
me at thy table: what right have I therefore yet to complain unto
the king (even about injustice)?" Now this son of Jonathan was the
ancestor of a Jerusalem family which flourished till after the exile.
Older traits in 1Samuel xx. are the importance attached to the new
moon, the family sacrifice at Bethlehem, perhaps the stone )BN )CL
which appears to have implied something inconsistent with later
orthodoxy, the name being in two passages so singularly corrupted.
*************************************************
Chapter xviii. 6 seq. manifests tendency in a bad sense, even
apart from the additions of the Masoretic text. Here Saul's
enmity against David is carried back to the very beginning of
their relations together, and even his friendship is represented
as dissembled hatred. All the honours with which the king covers
his armour-bearer are interpreted as practices to get rid of him.
He makes him his son-in-law in order to expose him to deadly
danger in his efforts to procure the hundred foreskins of the
Philistines which were the price of the daughter. The connection
cannot dispense with xviii. 6 seq, but at the same time it is
beyond doubt that the venomous way of interpreting the facts is a
mark of later revision. For Saul here practices his perfidies
with the cognisance of his servants, who must therefore have been
well aware of his disposition towards David; but the old narrator
proceeds on the opposite assumption, that his hatred appeared all
at once, and that David had been held by all up to that time to
be one of the king's favourite servants: cf. xxi. 2-xxii. 14
seq., not to speak of chapter xx. And this alone agrees with the
nature of Saul as it is everywhere described to us.
It is a characteristic circumstance that the corruption of the
tradition is greatest in those narratives in which Samuel enters
into the history of David. There are two insertions of this
kind. According to xix. 18-24 David flees to the old man at
Ramah, where the school of the prophets is; Saul sends messengers
to take him, but these, when they come near Samuel and see him in
command of a troop of ecstatic enthusiasts, are seized by the
frenzy like the rest. The second set of messengers whom Saul
sends, and the third, fare no better; and Saul has at last to
come himself. But he also is drawn into the vortex, tears off his
clothes and dances before Samuel and David, the only
self-possessed spectators of the bacchantic company, till he falls
down; and he lies naked as he is a whole day and a whole night
upon the ground--whence the proverb, "Is Saul also among the
prophets?" But that David when he fled, fled in earnest and went
in the direction of Judah, instead of amusing himself by going
first towards the north, is perfectly evident, as much so as that
it is a serious abuse of the spirit of prophecy to make it serve
ends which are foreign to its nature, and turn it into a mere
instrument for the personal safety of David, who had no need
whatever to wait for Saul at Ramah to play him a trick
there. The narrative, which is unknown to the author of xv. 35,
arose out of the proverb which is quoted in it, but this receives
elsewhere (x. 12) a much more worthy interpretation. We can
scarcely avoid the suspicion that what we have before us here is
a pious caricature; the point can be nothing but Samuel's and
David's enjoyment of the disgrace of the naked king. For the
general history of the tradition the most interesting
circumstance is that Samuel has here become the head of a school
of prophets and the leader of their exercises. In the original
view of the matter (chaps. ix. x.) he appears alone and
independent, and has nothing to do with the companies of the
ecstatics, the Nebiim. He is a _Roeh_ or seer, not a _Nabi_ or
prophet. True, it is asserted in the gloss, ix. 9, that the two
words mean the same thing, that what is now called _Nabi_ was
formerly called _Roeh_. But that is scarcely quite correct. The
author of ix. x. knows the name _Nabi_ very well too, but he
never applies it to Samuel; he only uses it, in the plural, of
the troops of Jehovah--intoxicated dervishes. He gives it quite
a different meaning from _Roeh_, and also quite a different meaning
from that in which Isaiah and Jeremiah use the word _Nabi_. /1/
*****************************************
1 As the words are used in 1Samuel i.Y., Isaiah and Jeremiah would
rather be called Roeh; and this is the justification of the
gloss, ix. 9.
***************************************
We cannot doubt that these distinctions rest on a historical basis,
and only gradually melted away in later times: so that Samuel
the seer need not be degraded into one of the flagellants.
David's flight to Samuel presupposes some previous relation to
him, and xix. 18 seq. seems to point back to xvi. 1-13. In
this piece David's career begins with his being anointed king in
Saul's place at Jehovah's command, when a mere shepherd boy, who
was not even counted in the family he belonged to. But in the
sequel no one knows anything about this. Even in the story of
Goliath (which in other respects harmonizes better with xvi. 1-13
than any other piece) the older brothers, here three, not seven,
know nothing of the anointing of the youngest, although they were
present and heard their own claims discussed (xvii. 28). In the
stories of David's persecution also, chapter xxiv. xxvi., Saul
alone is the sacred person, the anointed of Jehovah, not David.
A belief that David is chosen for high things by God is quite a
different matter from an anointing which has already taken place
in fact. And if consequent and antecedent be inseparable,
we must remember how, according to xv. 35, Samuel not only
withdraws himself from Saul till his death, but also feels grieved
for him till his death. It is a harsh transition from xv. 35:
"Samuel came no more to see Saul till the day of his death,
because he mourned over him," to xvi. 1:
"and Jehovah spake to him, How long wilt thou mourn for Saul,
seeing I have rejected him?"
But it appears clearly that the appointment of the successor
was connected with, and a consequence of, the deposition of the
predecessor.
The anointing of David by Samuel is at the same time the set-off
to the anointing of Saul by Samuel. This is clearly seen on
comparing x. 6, xi. 6, "and the Spirit of God leapt upon Saul,"
with xvi. 13, 14, "and the Spirit of Jehovah leapt upon David,
and it departed from Saul." In the former case the inspiration is
a momentary foaming over, in the latter (the leaping
notwithstanding) it is a permanent property; and this difference
alone leaves no doubt as to where the original is to be looked
for, and where the imitation. Saul alone, according to the old
tradition, was made king in a divine, i.e. an overpowering and
ideal manner: David was made king in a tedious human way, and
after many intermediate stages. Of Saul alone was it originally
told that the sudden outbreak of the spirit with which he,
unelected as he was, summoned the levy of Israel, placed himself
at its head, defeated the Ammonites, and became king, was quietly
prepared by an old seer, who pointed out to him his great
calling, and filled him with confidence in himself by secretly
anointing him in the name of Jehovah. All that was known of David
was how by his own energy he raised himself from a soldier to be
the leader of a band, from that to be the vassal prince, under the
Philistines, of Ziklag and Judah, and from a vassal prince to be
the independent and powerful king of Israel. He also was anointed,
not, however, beforehand by God, but after his elevation, by the
elders of Judah and Israel. But this human origin and this
inferiority in point of divine consecration to a predecessor
whose kingdom, as it turned out, Jehovah had not made to stand,
was found by a later age to be unworthy of him: he must at least
have received his anointing from Samuel as well as Saul. And this
was accordingly made good by the legend (xvi. 1-13). It is a
step further on this downward path that in the Judaistic version
(x. 17 seq.) all mention is omitted of the anointing of Saul.
We return to Samuel. The Books of Samuel take their name from
him, and he is a figure of great importance, if not for the history
itself, yet for the history of the tradition, the progress of
which may be measured by the change of view about his person.
In the views taken about him we may distinguish four stages.
Originally (ix. 1-x. 16) he is simply a seer, but at the same
time a patriotic Israelite, who feels deeply the need of his
country, and uses his authority as seer to suggest to the ear and
to the mind of one whom he recognises as fit for the purpose, his
destination to be Israel's deliverer and leader. This relation
between seer and warrior must be held fast and regarded as
historical if Samuel is to mean anything at all. Similar instances
are those of Deborah and Barak in earlier times, and later, that
of Elisha and Hazael, and still more, that of Elisha and Jehu.
Samuel's greatness consists in this, that he rouses to activity
the man who comes after him, and is greater than he: after
kindling the light which now burns in its full brightness, he
himself disappears. But his meteoric appearance and disappearance
excited wonder, and this in early times produced a story of his
youth, in which, while still a boy, he predicts the ruin of
pre-monarchical Israel (1Samuel i.-iii.). After he has done this,
darkness closes completely around him. Even in chapter iv. he
has completely disappeared, and when we meet him again he is an
old man. On the other side the circumstance that we hear nothing
more of the seer after his meeting with Saul, caused it to be
believed that a rupture very soon took place between the two.
This belief we meet with at the second stage of the tradition which
is represented by the prophetical narratives recorded in chaps.
xvi. and xxviii. It arose out of the inconsistency involved in
the fact that Jehovah did not afterwards confirm in his reign the
man whom He had chosen to be king, but overthrew his dynasty.
Thus it becomes necessary that Samuel, who anointed Saul, should
afterwards sorrowfully reject him. Even here he appears no longer
as the simple seer, but as a prophet in the style of Elijah and
Elisha who regards the Lord's anointed as his own handiwork, and
lays on him despotic commands (xv. 1), though according to x. 7
he had expressly left him to be guided by his own inspiration.
The transition from the second to the third stage is easy. Here
Samuel, after withdrawing the unction from Saul, at once transfers
it to David, and sets him up against his rejected predecessor as
being now de jure king by the grace of God. The respect with
v.hich he is regarded has meanwhile increased still further;
when he comes to Bethlehem the elders tremble at his approach
(xvi. 4 seq.); and in xix. 18 seq. he has a magical power over men.
Up to this stage, however, he has always been regarded as
intellectually the author of the monarchy. It is reserved for the
last (exilian or post-exilian) stage of the development of the
tradition to place him in the opposite position of one who resists
to the uttermost the desire of the people to have a king. Here
pre-monarchical Israel is advanced to a theocracy, and Samuel is
the head of the theocracy, which accounts for the feelings aroused
in him by their demand.
The modern judgment has been prejudiced in Saul's favour by
Samuel's curse, and to David's disadvantage by Samuel's blessing;
the picture of the one has not suffered from the blackening so
much as that of the other from the glorification. /1/
*************************************
1. The efforts of later writers to glorify David are at their worst
in their account of his last testament (1Kings ii. 1-12). Even
the language betrays this piece as a post-Deuteronomic insertion
(v. 2-4); the contents are borrowed from the succeeding narrative.
But in the narrative Solomon's conduct towards Adonijah, Abiathar,
Joab, and Shimei is not dictated by any means by the testament,
but by other considerations; and it is the declared object of the
narrator to show how Solomon's throne was established by the
removal of the elements of danger. Nor do the acute calculations
of the weak old king agree very well with the general impression
given of him at this time by 1Kings i. ii.
****************************************
Some critics, who are unencumbered either by prejudice or by
knowledge of the subject, regard Saul as the antagonist and David
as the creature of the clerical lust of rule, of which they see
the embodiment in Samuel. But this view gives Samuel a powerful
position over against the king such as he cannot have possessed
unless he had broad ground under his feet and an influence well and
extensively organised. Did he find support in the Nebiim? These
were only then rising into view out of an irregular enthusiasm
which was not yet confined to any definite circle or school; and
besides, the old tradition speaks of a close connection between
them and the king, but not between them and the seer. The belief
that the latter was the founder and president of their guild is
based on the worthless anachronistic anecdote, 1Samuel xix. 18
seq. Or was Samuel in conspiracy with the priests against Saul?
This is inferred from 1Samuel xxi.-xxii. where Abimelech of Nob
provides David with bread on his wanderings, and expiates this
offence with his own death and that of the whole race of Eli. But
in the first place these priests have no connection with Samuel.
In the second place there is nothing to make it probable that they
had an understanding with David, or were acquainted with his
ambitious plans if he had then begun to cherish them. In the third
place, it is positively certain that they represented no distinct
power in the state as against the king, but on the contrary were
entirely the creatures of his smile or frown; on the occurrence
of a faint suspicion they were put to death to a man without a dog
barking to remonstrate. The liberal view we are discussing of
Samuel's relation to Saul and David is based on the erroneous
assumption that Samuel had the hierocracy to rest on in his acts
of opposition to the monarchy. But the student who carries back the
hierocracy to these early times has still to learn the very
elements of what is necessary to a true historical appreciation of
Hebrew antiquity.
VI.III.
It is in the Book of Kings that the last revision works most
unrestrictedly. Here also chronological and religious elements
combine to the building up of the framework, and we begin with
examining the chronological system.
From the exodus from Egypt to the beginning of the building of
the temple was a period of 430 years; and from the latter to the
destruction of Jerusalem, a period, according to the numbers of
the kings of Judah, of 430 years, or reckoning the exile, of 480
years, as before. In Chronicles, the succession from Azariah ben
Ahimaaz, who was, according to the correct reading, the first to
officiate in the temple of Solomon, to Jozadak, who was carried
away in the captivity, consists of eleven high priests; thus,
reckoning the exile, we have again twelve generations of 40 years
each. The detailed figures which compose the total are here more
complicated, which is no doubt partly due to the fact that some
of them are dates which the reviser found given. Yet in this
instance also the number 40 is the basis of calculation, as we see
in the reigns of the kings of Judah. From the division of the
kingdom to the destruction of Samaria in the 6th year of Hezekiah,
the numbers are as follows: Rehoboam and Abijam, 20; Asa, 41;
Jehoshaphat, Joram, Ahaziah, Athaliah, 40; Joash, 40; Amaziah and
Uzziah, 81; Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, 38. From the destruction of
Samaria to the last date in Kings (2Kings xxv. 27), Hezekiah,
Manasseh, Amon, have 80; Josiah, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin,
79 1/4. Let him believe who can that it is a mere chance that the
figures 41 + 81 + 38 make up exactly 40 + 80 + 40.
The series of the kings of Israel is in point of chronology
dependent on the series of Judah. According to the numbers of the
latter, 393 years elapsed from the division of the kingdom to the
Babylonian captivity; and if we assume with Ezekiel (iv. 4) that
Samaria fell 150 years earlier than Judah, 243 years remain for
the duration of the northern kingdom. The figures given amount in
fact to 242 years. These 150 Israelite years, from the
destruction of Samaria to the destruction of Jerusalem, exceed, it
is true, by 17 the sum of the parallel years of Judah; and the
Israelite years from 1 Jeroboam to 9 Hosea fall short of the years
in Judah from 1 Rehoboam to 6 Hezekiah by about the same number.
This shows that no effort was made at first to synchronise the
individual reigns in the two series. The 242 years of the
northern kingdom are divided, by the epoch of 1 Jehu, into 98 and
144. If we take them at 240, the half of 480, the 98 must be
changed into 96, which then agree with the contemporary 96 Jewish
years. The deduction must be made at the reign of Baasha. Then
we get the following play of figures: Jeroboam 22, Nadab 2,
Baasha 22, Elah 2, Omri 12, Ahab 22, Ahaziah 2, Joram 12. That is
to say, the eight kings have together 96 years, the first four and
the last four 48 each. Two have the average number 12; the other
6 consists of three pairs of father and son; and the twice 12
years belonging to each pair are divided so that the father gets
12 + 10, and the son 12 - 10, obviously because the father was
considered much more important than the son. /1/
***************************************
1. Numbers of the kings of Judah from Solomon : 37+ 17+ 3 + 41 + 25
+ 8 + 1 + 6 + 40 + 29 + 52 + 16 + 29 + 55 + 2 + 31 + 11 + 11=430 years.
Jehoahaz and Jechoiachin are not counted; if they are included and a
year allowed for them, we must say 36 for Solomon. Numbers of the
kings of Israel from 1 Jeroboam: 22 + 2 + 24 +2+ 12 + 22 + 2+ 12 + 28 +
17 + 16 + 41 + 1 + 10 + 2 + 20 + 9. The artificial relations of the
numbers, as explained above, were communicated to me by Ernst Krey.
On the point that the synchronisms do not belong to the original
arrangement, see Jahrb. fur Deutsche Theol., 1875, p. 607 seq.
The correct view of Ezekiel iv. was first published by Bernhard Duhm
(Theol. dir Proph., p. 253). The number 390, given in the Massoretic
text in verse 5 for the duration of the captivity of the northern
Israelites, is impossible. For Ezekiel cannot mean that they have
been 350 years in exile already, and on the other hand he cannot
reckon the remaining period of their punishment at more than 40 years,
because 40 years is his calculation of the period of exile of
Judah, and the restitution of Israel and that of Judah are in his
view to take place at the same time; and indeed that of Egypt as well,
obviously because brought about by the same cause (xxix. 1 1-16),
the fall of the Chaldeans, which may be expected to take place in
40 years. The number 390 has got into verse 5 by mistake from verse 9,
where it is used of a quite different subject, not the years of the
exile, but the days of the last siege of Jerusalem. The gloss verse
13 rests on a similar confusion. The Septuagint correctly gives
for the Israelite exile the number of 150 years, or 190, according
as the last 40 years in which their punishment continued, along
with that of Judah, were included or omitted. It may be remarked
that 390 = 240 + 150. Compare further Robertson Smith, in the
Journal of Philologie, vol x., p. 209-213.
**********************************************
The great period thus marked off and artificially divided into
subperiods, is surveyed and appraised at every important epoch in
sermon-like discourses. These are much more frequent in Kings
than in Judges and Samuel. It makes no difference whether the
writer speaks in his own person, or by the mouth of another; in
reviews of the past he speaks himself, 2Kings xvii.; in
anticipations of the future he makes another speak (1Kings viii.
ix.). A few examples must be cited to show what we mean.
The great epoch of the work is the building of the temple. On this
occasion Solomon makes a great dedicatory oration, in which he
entreats Jehovah to hear from heaven the prayer of those who shall
seek Him in this place. He concludes as follows:
"If they sin against Thee (for there is no man that sinneth not)
and Thou be angry with them and deliver them to be carried away
captive into the land of the enemy, far or near, if they then
bethink themselves and make supplication to Thee, saying, We have
sinned and have done perversely and are guilty, and so return unto
Thee with all their heart and all their soul in the land of the
enemies which led them away captive, and pray unto Thee toward
their land which Thou gavest unto their fathers, the city which
Thou hast chosen, and the house which Thou hast built for Thy name,
then hear Thou in heaven their prayer and their supplication, and
maintain their cause, and forgive thy people their
unfaithfulness, and give them compassion before them that carried
them away captive, that they may have compassion upon them. For
they be Thy people and Thine inheritance, which Thou broughtest
forth out of Egypt from the midst of the furnace of iron, and
didst separate them to Thyself from among all the people of the
earth, as Thou spakest by Moses thy servant."
What Jehovah answered to this we learn in chapter ix.
"I have heard thy prayer and thy supplication which thou hast made
before me; I have hallowed this house, to put my name there for ever,
and mine eyes and my heart shall be there perpetually. If thou wilt
walk before me, as did David thy father, in integrity of heart
and in uprightness, to do all that I have commanded thee, and wilt
keep my statutes and my judgments, I will establish the throne of
thy kingdom upon Israel for ever, as I promised to David thy father,
saying, There shall not fail thee a man upon the throne of Israel.
But if YE or YOUR CHILDREN turn away from me, and will not keep
my statutes and my judgments which I have set before you, but
worship other gods, then will I cut off Israel out of the land
which I have given them, and this house which I have hallowed for
my name I will cast out of my sight, and Israel shall be a
proverb and a byword among all people, and this house a ruin.
And when they ask: Why hath Jehovah done thus to this land and
to this house? the answer shall be: Because they forsook Jehovah
their God, who brought forth their fathers out of the land of
Egypt, and have taken hold upon other gods, and have worshipped
them and served them."
The division of the kingdom is also a very marked era in the
history. It is introduced by a prophecy of Abijah to the first
Jeroboam.
"Behold, I rend the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon, and will
give ten tribes to thee; but he shall have one tribe for my servant
David's sake, and for Jerusalem's sake, the city which I have chosen;
because he has forsaken me, and worshipped Astarte of Sidon, and
Chemosh of Moab, and Milcom of Ammon, and has not walked in my ways
to do that which is right in my eyes, my statutes, and my judgments,
like David his father. And it shall be, if thou wilt hearken unto
all that I command thee, and wilt walk in my ways, and do what is
right in my sight, to keep my statutes and my commandments as David
my servant did, that I will be with thee and build thee a sure house
as I built for David, and will give Israel unto thee. And I will
for this afflict the seed of David, but not for ever."
We pass over a series of prophecies in a similar strain which occur
regularly at the changes of dynasty in the northern kingdom, and
cite only the concluding words which accompany the fall of the
kingdom of the ten tribes (2Kings xvii.). This fall came about
"because the children of Israel sinned against Jehovah their God,
which brought them up out of the land of Egypt, and feared other
gods, and walked in the statutes of the heathen whom they had
driven out, and in the innovations of the kings of Israel; and
because the children of Israel imputed to Jehovah their God things
which are not so, and built them high places in all their cities,
from the tower of the watchman to the fenced city; and they set up
pillars and Asheras on every high hill and under every green tree,
and there they sacrificed in all the high places, as did the people
whom Jehovah had driven out before them: and wrought wicked things
to provoke Jehovah to anger, and served the abominations which
Jehovah had forbidden. Yet Jehovah testified to them by all the
prophets and seers, saying, Turn ye from your evil ways, and keep
my commandments and my statutes according to all the torah which
I commanded your fathers, and which I sent unto you by my servants
the prophets; but they would not hear, but hardened their necks
like their fathers, that they did not believe in Jehovah their
God; and they rejected His statutes and His covenant that He
made with their fathers, and His testimonies with which He warned
them, and they followed vanity and became vain, and went after
the heathen that were round about them, concerning whom Jehovah
had charged them that they should not do like them. And they
left all the commandments of Jehovah their God, and made them
molten images and an Asherah, and worshipped the whole host of
heaven, and served Baal; and they caused their children to pass
through the fire, and used divination and enchantments, and sold
themselves to do evil in the sight of Jehovah, to provoke Him to
anger. And Jehovah was very wroth with Israel, and removed them
out of His sight; there was none left but the men of Judah only.
But they of Judah also kept not the commandment of their God, but
walked in the manner of Israel: and Jehovah rejected the whole
race of Israel, and humbled them, and delivered them unto the hand
of spoilers, until He had cast them out of His sight."
No special concluding discourse is given for Judah, but that for
Israel applies to Judah as well. This we see both directly from
the last words of the passage cited, and from the circumstance
that two very characteristic abominations in the foregoing catalogue,
the worship of the host of heaven and the sacrifice of children,
were introduced, according to the testimony of the prophets, which
alone can determine the point, not in the eighth but only in the
seventh century, under Manasseh, and accordingly are not
chargeable on Israel, but only on Judah.
The water accumulates, so to speak, at these gathering places of
the more important historical epochs: but from these reservoirs
it finds its way in smaller channels on all sides. /1/ The first
************************************
1. Such additions as MCWT YHWH, 1Kings xviii. 18 [LXX has
correctly YHWH, without MCWT] (ZBW BRYTK [LXX correctly (ZBW
without BRYTK] and more extensive ones, as 1Kings xviii. 31, 32a;
2Samuel vii. 2b [)#R NQR) WGW''] ) I do not
reckon because they proceed from various periods, and are mostly
younger than the Deuteronomic revision, and belong rather to textual
than to literary criticism. It is certainly in itself very important
to detect and remove these re-touchings. The whole old tradition
is covered with them.
*****************************************
question asked with regard to each ruler is, what position he took
up to the pure religion--whether he did what was right or what was
evil in the sight of Jehovah. Even in the case of those who only
reigned a week, this question receives an answer. In general it
has to be stated that they did evil. All except David and Hezekiah
and Josiah, were defective, says Jesus Sirach (xlix. 4),--not quite
accurately perhaps, but yet truly in so far as there is always some
objection even to the good kings. But the sin here reproved is no
longer, at least not principally, the worship of strange gods; it
is the perverted worship of Jehovah. A more special standard, and
therefore a stricter one, is now employed, and we know the reason
of this: the temple having once been built in the place which Jehovah
has chosen for Himself, the kindly naturalness hitherto belonging to
His worship comes to an end (Deuteronomy xii. 8): and in particular
the prohibition of the bamoth comes into force (1Kings iii. 2).
That these continued to exist is the special sin of the period,
a sin widespread and persistent. It is aggravated by the fact,
that with the bamoth all kinds of unlawful abuses crept into the
worship of Jehovah, Maccebas and Asheras, evergreen trees, and
prostitutes of both sexes. Israel, continually compared with Judah
in the matter, is further charged with a second great sin, the sin
of Jeroboam, i.e., the golden calves at Bethel and at Dan. The
religious estimate combines with the chronological facts to form
that scheme in which every single reign of the kings of Israel
and Judah is uniformly framed. Sometimes the frame is well filled
in with interesting matter, but in not a few cases historical matter
is almost entirely absent. The scheme appears most nakedly in such
chapters as 1Kings xv. xvi., 2Kings xiii. xiv. xv.
That this redaction of our book is essentially uniform with that
of the two historical books which precede it, requires no proof.
Only it has here a warmer and more lively tone, and a much
closer relation to the facts. In consequence of this we find it
much easier to determine the point of view from which it proceeds.
The mere fact that the narrative extends to the destruction of
Jerusalem, nay, to the death of the captive king Jehoiachin, shows
that we must place the date of the work not earlier than the
Babylonian exile, and, indeed, the second part of the exile.
The chronology reckons the exile in the period of 480 years, giving
50 years to it; and this would bring us still lower down; but it
is open to us to assume that this is a later modification, which
has not further affected the general character of the work. /1/
**************************************
1. Krey surmises that the last date mentioned, the liberation from
prison of, Jehoiachin in the 37th year after his accession to the
throne, was originally intended to form the lower limit of the
chronology, especially as the periods of 40 years under which, as
we have seen, the Jewish figures naturally fall, come exactly to
this date. But if this be the case, we cannot regard the 4th or
5th year of Solomon as the era started from, for then there is no
room for the 36 or 37 remaining years of Solomon's reign. But such
a starting-point is entirely unnatural; Solomon's 40 years
cannot be torn up in this way: if we are to make a division at
all in that period, it must be at the disruption of the monarchy,
the natural point of departure for the series of kings of Israel
and of Judah. It deserves remark, that the 37 years of Jehoiachin,
at the close of the older mode of calculation, which perhaps only
tried to bring out generations of 40 years, but also perhaps a
period of 500 years from David (40+40+20+ 41+40+40+81 + 38+ 80 + 79
1/4), answer to the 37 years of Solomon at the beginning of the
method now carried through. That a process of alteration and
improvement of the chronology was busily carried on in later
times, we see from the added svnchronisms of the kings of Israel
and Judah, from the uncertain statements in the Book of Judges,
some of them parallel with each other (e.g., the interregna and
minor judges, and the threefold counting of the time of the
Philistines) and even from the variants of the LXX.
***************************************************
The writer looks back on the time of the kings as a period past
and closed, on which judgment has already been declared. Even at
the consecration of the temple the thought of its destruction is
not to be restrained; and throughout the book the ruin of the nation
and its two kingdoms is present to the writer's mind. This is the
light in which the work is to be read; it shows why the catastrophe
was unavoidable. It was so because of unfaithfulness to Jehovah,
because of the utterly perverted tendency obstinately followed
by the people in spite of the Torah of Jehovah and His prophets.
The narrative becomes, as it were, a great confession--of sins of
the exiled nation looking back on its history. Not only the
existing generation, but the whole previous historical development
is condemned--a fashion which we meet with first in Jeremiah (ii.
1 seq., iv. 3), who was actually confronted with the question as
to the cause of the calamity. /2/
**************************************
1. The fall of Samaria suggested similar reflections to the earlier
prophets with reference to the northern kingdom, but their views
are, as a rule (Amos v., Isaiah ix.), not nearly so radical nor so
far-fetched. Hosea does certainly trace the guilt of the present
up to the commencement, but he exemplifies the principle (like Micah,
chapter vi.) chiefly from the early history of Jacob and Moses: as for
the really historical period he belongs to it too much himself to survey
it from so high a point of view. In this also he is a precursor of
later writers, that he regards the human monarchy as one of the
great evils of Israel: he certainly had very great occasion for
this in the circumstances of the time he lived in.
*******************************************
Ezekiel carried out this negative criticism of the past to greater
lengths, with particular reference to the abominations of the older
worship (chapter xvi., xx., xxiii.); and it is also to be found in
Isaiah xl.-xlvi. (xlii. 24, xliii. 27), though here it is
supplemented by a positive and greatly more suggestive view;
we find it also in Deuteronomy xxviii.-xxx., and in Leviticus xxvi.
The whole of the past is regarded as one enormous sin, which is to
be expiated in the exile (Jeremiah xxxii. 30; Ezekiel xviii. 2,
xxxiii. 10; Isaiah xl. 1); the duration of the punishment is even
calculated from that of the sin (Leviticus xxvi. 34). The same
attitude towards old times is continued after the return
(Zechariah viii. 13 seq., ix. 7 seq.; Nehemiah ix. 7 seq.).
The treatment is naturally from a Judaean point of view. Outside
of Jerusalem the worship of Jehovah is heretical, so that the
political revolt of the Northern Israelites was at the same time
an ecclesiastical schism. Yet they are not excluded in
consequence from community with the people of God, as in the
Chronicles: the old traditions are not thrown so completely
overboard as yet: only after the destruction of Samaria by the
Assyrians does Judah continue the history alone. Almost the same
reverence is paid to David and his house as to the city and the
temple. His house has the promise of eternal continuance, with
regard to which the writer likes to make use of the words of
Jeremiah xxxiii. 17. The book closes, doubtless not by chance,
with the liberation from prison of the Davidide Jehoiachin; this
is the earnest of greater things yet in store. In the words of
Abijah to Jeroboam, also, when he says that the humiliation of
the house of David and the revolt from it of the ten tribes will
not last for ever, we see the Messianic hope appear, which, as we
learn from Haggai and Zechariah, largely occupied the minds of
the Jews at the time of the exile and after it.
In the case of the books of Judges and Samuel it is not perhaps
possible to decide with perfect certainty what was the norm
applied by the last reviser in forming his estimates of the past.
In the Books of Kings there can be no doubt on this point. The
writer deals not only in indefinite references to the will of
Jehovah, which Israel ought to obey, but resists; he speaks now
and again (1Kings ii. 3, 2Kings xiv. 6, xvii. 37) of the written
Torah in which the judgments and statutes of Jehovah are contained,
a difference which indicates, one must allow, a historical feeling.
Now the code which is implicitly regarded as the standard is that
the discovery of which under Josiah is circumstantially narrated
in 2Kings xxii. xxiii., viz., Deuteronomy. We are led to this
conclusion, it is allowed on all hands, both by the phraseology
of the reviser and by the spirit of his judgments. He condemns
those sins specially against which Deuteronomy and the reformation
of King Josiah were directed. And the one verbal quotation made
from the book of the Torah is from Deuteronomy (2Kings xiv. 6;
Deuteronomy xxiv. 16). On the other hand, there are clear signs
that the author of the revision was not acquainted with the
Priestly Code. Nowhere is any distinction drawn between priests
and Levites; the sons of Aaron are never mentioned. The idea of
a central sanctuary before Solomon is contradicted by 1Kings iii.
2. In one section only, a section which has been greatly exposed
to corrections and interpolations of all kinds, namely, the
description of the temple and its consecration, 1Kings vi.-viii.,
do we meet with signs of the influence of the Priestly Code,
especially in the Massoretic text; in the Septuagint this is not
so much the case. The most important example of this has already
been investigated, p. 43, 44.
If, accordingly, we are fully justified in calling the revision
Deuteronomistic, this means no more than that it came into
existence under the influence of Deuteronomy, which pervaded the
whole century of the exile. The difference between
Deuteronomistic and Deuteronomic is one not of time only but of
matter as well: /1/ Deuteronomy itself has not yet come to regard
******************************************
1. Post-deuteronomic, but still from the time of the kings, are
1Samuel ii. 27 seq.; 2Samuel vii, 1 seq.; 2Kings xviii. 13, 17
seq., xix. 1 seq.; chaps. xi. xii. xxi. xxiii.
*******************************************
the cultus in this way as the chief end of Israel, and is much
closer to the realism of the actual life of the people. A
difference in detail which allows of easy demonstration is
connected with the mode of dating. The last reviser distinguishes
the months not by their old Hebrew names, Zif, Bul, Ethanim, but
by numbers, commencing with spring as the beginning of the year.
In this he differs not only from his older sources (1Kings vi.
37, 38, viii. 2), but also from Deuteronomy.
VII.III.2. This revision is, as we expect to find, alien to the
materials it found to work on, so that it does violence to them.
They have been altered in particular by a very one-sided selection,
which is determined by certain religious views. In these views an
interest in the prophets mingles with the interest in worship. It
is not meant that the selection is due entirely to the last
reviser, though it is thoroughly according to his taste; others
had probably worked before him in this direction. But for us it
is neither possible nor important to distinguish the different
steps in the process of sifting through which the traditions of
the time of the kings had to pass.
The culminating point of the whole book is the building of the
temple; almost all that is told about Solomon has reference to
it. This at once indicates to us the point of view; it is one
which dominates all Judaistic history: the history is that of
the temple rather than of the kingdom. The fortunes of the
sanctuary and its treasures, the institution and arrangements of
the kings with reference to worship--we are kept _au courant_ about
these, but about hardly anything else. The few detailed
narratives given (2Kings xi seq. xvi. xxii. seq.) have the
temple for their scene, and turn on the temple. Only in
<2Kings?> xviii. seq. does the prophetical interest
predominate.
As for the kingdom of Israel, the statements about the cultus of
that state are very scanty and for the most part rather vague.
Here the prophetical narratives come to the front, generally such
as are told from the prophetic point of view, or at least tell of
the public appearances and acts of the prophets. Here and there
we are told of occasions on which the Northern kingdom came in
contact with Judah; here the Jewish feeling appears which dictated
the selection. What is merely historical, purely secular, is
communicated only in the scantiest measure: often there is
nothing but the names and succession of the kings. We learn
hardly anything about King Omri, the founder of the town of
Samaria and re-founder of the kingdom, who seems to have reduced
Judah also to the position of a dependent ally, nor do we learn
more about Jeroboam II., the last great ruler of Israel; while
the conflict with the Assyrians and the fall of Samaria are
despatched in a couple of verses which tell us scarcely anything
at all. Sometimes a brilliant breaks in on the surrounding night
(2Kings ix. x.), but after it we grope in the dark again. Only
so much of the old tradition has been preserved as those of a
later age held to be of religious value: it has lost its original
centre of gravity, and assumed an attitude which it certainly had
not at first. It may have been the case in Judah that the temple
was of more importance than the kingdom, but there can be no
doubt that the history of Israel was not entirely, not even
principally, the history of prophecy. The losses we have to
deplore must have affected the Israelitish tradition most
seriously.
The damage done by the revision by its _positive_ meddling with
the materials as found in the sources, is not so irreparable; yet
it is considerable enough. The change of colour which was effected
may be best seen and characterised in the far-reaching
observations which introduce the Israelite series of kings;
"Jeroboam said in his heart, Now shall the kingdom return to the
house of David; if this people go up to do sacrifice in the house
of Jehovah at Jerusalem, then shall the heart of this people turn
again to their rightful lord, and they will kill me, and become
subject again to Rehoboam king of Judah. Whereupon the king took
counsel and made two calves of gold, and said unto them, Cease to
go up to Jerusalem; behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought
thee up out of the land of Egypt. And he set the one in Bethel
and the other in Dan. And this thing became a sin; for the
people went as one man, even unto Dan. And he made temples of
high places, and took priests from the midst of the people which
were not of the house of Levi; whomsoever he would he installed
as priest of the high places " (1Kings xii. 26-30, xiii. 33).
The perversion is scarcely so great as in Chronicles, but the
anachronism is sufficiently glaring in the mode of view
discernible in these reflections of Jeroboam, who appears to feel
that the Ephraimite kingdom was illegitimate in its origin and
could only be kept separate from the south by artificial means.
The blessing of Jacob and the blessing of Moses show us what the
sentiment of Northern Israel actually was. In the former Joseph
is called the crowned of his brethren, in the second we read
"His first-born bullock, full of majesty (the king), has the horns
of a buffalo, with which he thrusts down the peoples; these are the
ten thousands of Ephraim and the thousands of Manasseh."
Whence came the charm of the name of Ephraim but from its being the
royal tribe, and the most distinguished representative of the proud
name of Israel? Of Judah we read in the same chapter, "Hear,
Jehovah, the voice of Judah, and bring him back to his people."
There can be no doubt what the people is to which Judah belongs:
we cannot but agree with Graf, that this tribe is here regarded as
the alienated member, and its reunion with the greater kingdom
spoken of as the desire of Judah itself, and this is not so
remarkable when we reflect that the part belongs to the whole
and not the whole to the part. Only by long experience did Judah
learn the blessing of a settled dynasty, and Ephraim the curse of
perpetual changes on the throne.
Judah's power of attraction for the inhabitants of the Northern
Kingdom is thought to lie in the cultus of the Solomonic temple;
and Jeroboam is said to have tried to meet this by creating new
sanctuaries, a new form of the worship of Jehovah, and a new order
of priesthood. The features in which the Samaritan worship
differed from the Jewish pattern are represented as intentional
innovations of the first king, in whose sin posterity persisted.
But in making Bethel and Dan temples of the kingdom--that he set up
high places, is a statement which need not be considered--Jeroboam
did nothing more than Solomon had done before him; only he had
firmer ground under his feet than Solomon, Bethel and Dan being
old sanctuaries, which Jerusalem was not. The golden calves,
again, which he set up, differed in their gold but not in their
object from the ephods and idols of other kinds which were
everywhere to be found in the older "houses of God"; e.g. from
the brazen serpent at Jerusalem. /l/
*****************************************
1. "Although Jeroboam had lived in Egypt, it would he wrong to say
that he brought animal worship with him from that country, as
wrong as to regard Aaron's golden calf as a copy of Apis. The
peculiarity of the animal-worship of Egypt, and of its
bull-worship in particular, was that sanctity was attributed to
_living_ animals." Vatke, p. 398. Egyptian gods cannot help
against Egypt, Exodus xxxii. 4; 1Kings xii. 28.
****************************************
Even Eichhorn remarked with force and point, that though Elijah
and Elisha protested against the imported worship of Baal of Tyre,
they were the actual champions of the Jehovah of Bethel and Dan,
and did not think of protesting against His pictorial
representation; even Amos makes no such protest, Hosea is the
first who does so. As for the non-Levitical priests whom the king
is said to have installed, all that is necessary has been said on
this subject above (p. 138 seq.).
A remarkable criticism on this estimate of the Samaritan worship
follows immediately afterwards in the avowal that that of Judah
was not different at the time, at any rate not better. In the
report of Rehoboam's reign we read (1Kings xiv. 22 seq.):
"They of Judah also set up high places and pillars on every high
hill, and under every green tree, and whoredom at sacred places
was practiced in the land."
This state of things continued to exist, with some fluctuations,
till near the time of the exile. If then the standard according
to which Samaria is judged never attained to reality in Judah
either, it never existed in ancient Israel at all. We know the
standard is the book of the law of Josiah: but we see how the
facts were not merely judged, but also framed, in accordance
with it.
One more instance is worthy of mention in this connection. King
Solomon, we are told, had, besides the daughter of Pharaoh, many
foreign wives, from Moab, Ammon, and other peoples, intermarriage
with whom Jehovah had forbidden (Deuteronomy xvii 17). And when he was
old, they seduced him to the worship of their gods, and he
erected on the Mount of Olives at Jerusalem high places for
Chemosh of Moab, and for Milcom of Ammon, and for the gods of his
other wives. As a punishment for this Jehovah announced to him
that his kingdom should be torn from him after his death and given
to his servant, and also raised up adversaries to him, in Hadad
the Edomite, who freed Edom, and in the Syrian Rezon teen Eliadah,
who made Damascus independent. And by the prophet Abijah of
Shiloh, he caused the Ephraimite Jeroboam, who then had the
supervision of the forced labour of the house of Joseph in the
fortification of the city of David, to be nominated as the future
king of the ten tribes. So we read in 1Kings xi. But Edom, and,
as it appears, Damascus as well, broke away from the kingdom of
David immediately after his death (xi. 2I seq., 25); and the
fortification of the citadel, in which Jeroboam was employed when
incited to revolt by Abijah, though it falls somewhat later, yet
belongs to the first half of Solomon's reign, since it is
connected with the rest of his buildings (ix. 15, 24). Now
Solomon cannot have been punished by anticipation, in his youth,
for an offence which he only committed in his old age, and the
moral connected with these events is contradicted by chronology
and cannot possibly be ascribed to the original narrator. The
Deuteronomistic revision betrays itself, in fact, in every word
of xi. 1-13. To the original tradition belongs only the mention
of the many wives--without the reprobation attached to it,--and
the statement about the building of the altars of Chemosh and
Milcom and perhaps Astarte, on the Mount of Olives, where they
stood till the time of Josiah (2Kings xxiii. 13). The connection
of the two events, in the relation of cause and effect, belongs to
the last editor, as well as the general statement that the king
erected altars of the gods of all the nationalities represented by
his wives.
In the Books of Kings, it is true, the tradition is not
systematically translated into the mode of view of the Law, as
is the case in Chronicles. What reminds us most strongly of
Chronicles is the introduction from time to time of a prophet who
expresses himself in the spirit of Deuteronomy and in the
language of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and then disappears. /l/
******************************************
1. Cf. Kuenen, Profeten onder Israel (1875), ii. p. 143; English
translation (1877), p 398. One of these Deuteronomistic prophecies
is cited above, p. 275. They are in part anonymous, e.g, 2Kings
x. 30, xxi. 10 seq, in part connected with old names, e.g 1Kings
xvi. 1 seq. In many instances no doubt the reviser found
flints in his sources and worked them out in his own style; thus,
1Kings xiv. 7 seq., xxi 21 seq. 2Kings ix. 7 seq. In these
passages the Deuteronomistic ideas and the phraseology of
Jeremiah and Ezekiel are distinctly present [ HNNY MBY) R(h ], but
detached expressions of an original type also occur,--which, it is
true, are then constantly repeated, e.g. (CWN W(ZWB. Names,
too, like Jehu ben Hanani, are certainly not fictitious: we are
not so far advanced as in Chronicles. Cf. 1Samuel ii. 27 seq.;
2Samuel vii. 1 seq.
****************************************
In this way the Law is introduced into the history in a living
way; the prophets keep it effective and see it applied, according
to the principle stated, 2Kings xvii. 13, which is founded on
Jeremiah vii. 25; Deuteronomy xviii. 18:
"Jehovah testified to them by all the prophets and seers saying,
Turn ye from your evil ways and keep my commandments and statutes,
according to all the Torah which I commanded your fathers and which
I sent unto you by my servants the prophets."
The most unblushing example of this kind, a piece which, for historical
worthlessness may compare with Judges xix.-xxi. or 1Samuel vii. seq.,
or even stands a step lower, is 1Kings xiii. A man of God from Judah
here denounces the altar of Bethel, at which King Jeroboam is in the
act of offering sacrifice, in these terms:
"O altar, altar, behold a son shall be born to the house of David,
Josiah by name; and upon thee shall he offer the priests of the
high places, that burn incense upon thee, and men's bones shall be
burned upon thee."
And to guarantee the truth of this prophecy, to be fulfilled three
hundred years afterwards, he gives the sign that the altar shall
burst asunder, and the ashes of the sacrifice upon it be poured
out--which at once takes place. This legend, however, does not
really belong to the Deuteronomist, but is a still later
addition, as is easily to be seen from the fact that the sentence
xii. 31 is only completed at xiii. 34. It deserves remark that
in the two verses which introduce the thirteenth chapter, xii. 32
seq., the feast of tabernacles is fixed, in accordance with the
Priestly Code, as the 15th of the 7th month.
VII.III.3. In this case also we are able to discern considerable
shades and gradations in the sources the reviser had at command.
In the Books of Kings for the first time we meet with a series of
short notices which arrest attention, in the surroundings they are
in, by their brevity and directness of statement and the terseness
of their form, and have the semblance of contemporary records. In
spite of their looseness of arrangement these form the real basis
of our connected knowledge of the period; and the religious
chronological framework is regularly filled in with them (e.g.
1Kings xiv.-xvi.); their loose connection and neutral tone made
it specially easy for later editors to interweave with them
additions of their own, as has actually been done to no small
extent. /1/
*****************************************
1. The passage discussed above, 1Kings xi. 1 seq., gives a good
example of this; we at once pick out the terse )z ybnh wgw'' from
the barren diffuseness surrounding it.
****************************************
These valuable notes commence even with Solomon, though here they
are largely mixed with anecdotic chaff. They are afterwards found
principally, almost exclusively, in the series of Judah. Several
precise dates point to something of the nature of annals, /2/
****************************************
2. 5th of Rehoboam (1Kings xiv. 25); 23rd of Jehoash (2Kings xii,
6); 14th of Hezekiah (2Kings xviii. 13); 18th of Josiah (2Kings
xxii. 3); 4th and 5th of Solomon (1Kings vi. 37, 38). These
dates occur, it is true, partly in circumstantial Jewish
narratives, but these are intimately related to the brief notices
spoken of above, and appear to be based on them. It may be
surmised that such definite numbers, existing at one time in much
greater abundance, afforded the data for an approximate
calculation of the figures on which the systematic chronology is
built up. These single dates at any rate are not themselves
parts of the system. The same is true of the statements of the
age of the Jewish kings when they ascended the throne. These
also perhaps go back to the "Annals." The )Z is found 1Kings iii.
16, viii. 1, 12, ix. 11, xi. 7, xvi. 21, xxii. 50; 2Kings
viii. 22, xii. 18, xiv. 8, xv. 16, xvi. 5.
*****************************************
and with these the characteristic then might be thought to be
connected, which frequently introduces the short sentences, and
as it now stands is generally meaningless. In what circles these
records were made, we can scarcely even surmise. Could we be
certain that the reference to the royal temple of Judah, which is
a prevailing feature of them, is due not to selection at a later
time but to the interest of the first hands, we should be led to
think of the priesthood at Jerusalem. The loyalist, perfectly
official tone would agree very well with this theory, for the
sons of Zadok were, down to Josiah's time, nothing else than the
obedient servants of the successors of David, and regarded the
unconditional authority claimed by these kings over their
sanctuary as a matter of course (2Kings xvi. TO seq., xii. 18).
These notices, however, as we have them, are not drawn from the
documents themselves, but from a secondary compilation, perhaps
from the two sets of chronicles cited at the end of each reign of the
kings of Israel and those of Judah, from which at all events the
succession of the rulers appears to the drawn. These chronicles
are not to be identified, it is clear, with the original annals.
The _book_ of the annals must be distinguished from the Dibre-hajamim
themselves. Whether the chronicle of Israel_-hardly anything out
of which is communicated to us--was composed much earlier than the
chronicle of Judah (which seems to close with Jehoiachim), and
whether it and the chronicle of Solomon (1Kings xi. 41) are a
quite independent work, I am inclined to consider doubtful.
The excerpts from the annals are interrupted by more extensive
episodes which are interwoven with them, and are also embraced in
the Deuteronomistic scheme. Of these the Jewish ones are the
minority, the greater part are Samaritan, but they all belong to
a very limited period of time. I select the miraculous history
of Elijah as an example of these, to show the sentiment and the
change of sentiment in this instance also.
The prophet Elijah, from Tishbeh in Gilead, appears before King
Ahab of Samaria, and says,
"By the life of Jehovah the God of Israel, whom I serve, there
shall not be dew nor rain these years but according to my word."
The story begins abruptly; we require to know that Ahab, stirred
up by Jezebel, has been propagating in Israel the worship of the
Tyrian Baal, and has killed the prophets of Jehovah by hundreds:
this is the reason of the punishment which comes on him and his
land (xviii. 13, 22). Elijah vanishes as suddenly as he appeared.
We find him again at the brook Cherith, which flows into the Jordan;
then in the land of Baal with a widow at Zarepta; while following
his fortunes we are made to feel in a simple and beautiful way
the severity of the famine. Ahab in the meantime had sent out
messengers to take him, and had required of every state to which
the vain search had extended, an oath that he was not to be found
there. Now, however, necessity obliged him to think of other
things; he had to go out himself with his minister Obadiah to
seek fodder for the still remaining war-horses (Amos vii. 1). In
this humiliating situation he all at once met the banished man.
He did not believe his eyes. "Is it thou, O troubler of Israel?"
"I have not troubled Israel, but thou and thy father's house!"
After this greeting Elijah challenged the king to institute a
contest between the 450 prophets of Baal, and him, the only
prophet of Jehovah left remaining. A trial by sacrifice took
place on Mount Carmel before the whole people. Each party was to
prepare a bullock and lay it on the altar without setting fire to
the wood; and the divinity who should answer by fire was the
true God. The prophets of Baal came first and sought after their
own manner to influence their deity. They shouted and leapt
wildly, wounded themselves with swords and lances till they were
covered with blood, and kept up their raving ecstasy from morning
till mid-day, and from mid-day till evening. During this time
Elijah looked at them and mocked them, saying, "Cry louder, for he
is a god; either he is talking, or he is somehow engaged, or he
is asleep and must be awaked." At last his turn came; he repaired
the altar of Jehovah, which was broken down, spread the pieces of
the sacrifice upon it, and, to make the miracle still more
miraculous, caused them to be flooded two or three times with
water. Then he prayed to Jehovah, and fire fell from heaven, and
consumed the sacrifice. The people, up to this point divided in
their mind, now took the side of the zealot for Jehovah, laid hold
of the prophets of Baal, and slaughtered them down below at the
brook. A great storm of rain at once came to refresh the land.
This triumph of Elijah was only a prelude. When Jezebel heard
what had happened she swore vengeance against him, and he fled for
his life to Beersheba in Judah, the sanctuary of Isaac. Wearied
to death he lay down under a juniper-bush in the wilderness, and
with the prayer, It is enough: now, O Jehovah, take away my
life, he fell asleep. Then he was strengthened with miraculous
food by a heavenly messenger, and bidden to go to Horeb, the
mount of God. He arrived there after a long journey, and withdrew
into a cave; a rushing wind sweeps past; the wind and the
earthquake and the lightning are the forerunners of Jehovah; and
after them He comes Himself in the low whispering that follows the
storm. His head covered, Elijah steps out of the cave and hears a
voice ask what ails him. Having poured out his heart, he receives
the divine consolation that his cause is by no means lost; that
the direst vengeance, the instruments of which he is himself to
summon to their task, is to go forth on all the worshippers of
Baal, and that those 7000 who have not bowed their knee to Baal
shall gain the day--"Thou shalt anoint Hazael to be King over
Damascus, and Jehu ben Nimshi shalt thou anoint to be
iiing over Israel, and Elisha ben Shaphat to be prophet in thy
room; and him that escapeth the sword of Hazael shall Jehu slay,
and him that escapeth the sword of Jehu shall Elisha slay."
The account of the execution of these commands by Elijah is at
present wanting; we shall soon see why it was omitted. The
conclusion of chapter xix. only tells us that he called Elisha
from the plough to follow him. Of the account of the judgment
which overtook the worshippers of Baal, this group of
narratives contains only the beginning, in chapter xxi. Ahab
wanted to have a vineyard which was situated beside his palace in
Jezreel, his favourite residence: but Naboth, the owner, was
unwilling to enter on a sale or an exchange. The king was angry,
yet thought he could do no more in the matter; but Jezebel of
Tyre had other notions of might and right and said to him,
"Dost thou now govern the kingdom of Israel? be of good courage;
I will get thee the vineyard."
She wrote a letter to the authorities of the town, and got Naboth
put out of the way by means of corrupt judges. As Ahab was just
going to take possession of the vineyard which had fallen into his
hands, his enemy came upon him. The prophet Elijah, always on the
spot at the right moment, hurled the word at him,
"Hast thou killed and also taken possession? Behold, in the place
where dogs licked the blood of Naboth, shall dogs lick thy blood also."
Here this story breaks off. What follows is not the true continuation.
The thread of the narrative xvii.-xix. xxi. is also broken off
here, without reaching its proper conclusion. The victory of
Jehovah over Baal, of the prophet over the king, is wanting; the
story of Naboth is, as we said, only the introduction to it. We
are sufficiently informed about the facts, but in form the
narratives do not answer to the announcement in chapter xix. and
xxi.; they are drawn from other sources. According to xix. 1 7
the Syrian wars ought to result in vengeance on the worshippers of
Baal, and specially on the idolatrous royal house; but in the
narrative of the wars (1Kings xx. xxii. 2Kings vii. ix. )
this point of view does not prevail. On the contrary, Ahab and
Joram there maintain themselves in a manly and honourable way
against the superior power of Damascus it is ONLY AFTER the
extirpation of Baal worship under Jehu that affairs took an
unfortunate turn, and Hazael, who brought about this change, was
not anointed by Elijah but by Elisha (2Kings viii. 7 seq.) /.l/
*************************************
1. The same applies to Jehu (2Kings ix. 1 seq.). This is the
reason of the above remarked omission after 1Kings xix. 21: cf.
Thenius's commentary.
*************************************
The massacre at Jezreel, too, which is predicted in the threat of
1Kings xxi. 19, would need to be told otherwise than in 2Kings ix.
x., to form a proper literary sequel to the story of Naboth.
According to 1Kings xxi. 19 the blood of Ahab is to be shed at
Jezreel; according to 2Kings ix. 25 his son's blood was shed there,
to avenge Naboth. It is true, the explanation is appended in xxi.
27-29, that, as the king took to heart the threats of Elijah,
Jehovah made a supplementary communication to the prophet that
the threat against Ahab's house would only be fulfilled in the
days of his son; but who does not see in this an attempt to
harmonise conflicting narratives? /2/ A whole series of
***************************************
2 In spite of xxi. 27-29, an attempt is made at xxii. 38 to show
that the threat was fulfilled in Ahab himself. We are told that
Ahab was shot in his chariot and that his servants brought his
body from Ramoth-Gilead to bury it there. Then we read xxii. 38
"and they washed the chariot in the pool of Samaria, and the dogs
licked up his blood, and the harlots bathed in it, according to
the word of Jehovah."
Thus it is explained how the dogs were able to lick his blood in
Samaria, though it had had plenty of time to dry up after the
battle! The fact was unfortunately over-looked that according
to xxi. 19 the dogs were to lick the blood of Ahab not at Samaria
but at Jezreel, the place of Naboth. The verse xxii. 38 is an
interpolation which does credit to Jewish acuteness.
***************************************
subordinate discrepancies might be mentioned, which prove that
2Kings ix. x. does not look back to the story of the murder of
Naboth as told in 1Kings xxi. According to ix. 25, 26, the dispute
was not about the vineyard, but about the field of Naboth, which
lay some distance from the town. His family was put to death
along with him, and on the following day, when Ahab rode out IN
COMPANY WITH JEHU and Ben Deker to take possession of the field,
the word of the prophet (not framed so specially against him
personally) met him: "Surely I have seen yesterday the blood of
Naboth and of his sons, and I will requite it in this plat."
With the help of these other accounts, among which there is a
considerable group of uniform character (1Kings xx. xxii. 2Kings
iii. vi. 24-xii. 20. ix. 1-x. 27) favourably distinguished
from the rest, we are placed in a position to criticise the history
of Elijah, and to reach a result which is very instructive for
the history of the tradition, namely that the influence of the
mighty prophet on his age has after all been appraised much too
highly. His reputation could not be what it is but for the wide
diffusion of Baal worship in Israel: and this is not a little
exaggerated. Anything like a suppression of the national religion
at the time of Elijah is quite out of the question, and there is
no truth in the statement that the prophets of Jehovah were entirely
extirpated at the time and Elijah alone left surviving. The
prophetic guilds at Bethel, Jericho, and Gilgal continued without
any interruption. In the Syrian wars prophets of Jehovah stand by
the side of Ahab; before his last campaign there are four hundred
of them collected in his capital, one of them at least long known
to the king as a prophet of evil, but left alive before and left
alive now, though he persisted in his disagreeable practices. Of
the sons whom Jezebel bore him, Ahab called one Ahaziah, i.e.
Jehovah holds, and another Jehoram, i.e. Jehovah is exalted: he
adhered to Jehovah as the god of Israel, though to please his wife
he founded at Samaria a temple and a cultus of the Syrian goddess.
This being so, Elijah's contest with Baal cannot have possessed
the importance attributed to it from the point of view of a later time.
In the group of popular narratives above referred to, there is no
trace of a religious commotion that tore Israel asunder: the whole
strength of the people is absorbed in the Syrian wars. The kings
are the prominent figures, and do well and according to their office
in battle: Elijah stands in the background. From several indications,
though from no direct statements, we learn of the high esteem which
Ahab enjoyed from friend and foe alike (xx. 3I, xxii. 32-34 seq.).
Joram also, and even Jezebel, are drawn not without sympathy (2Kings
vi. 30, ix. 31). We can scarcely say the same of Jehu, the murderer,
instigated by the prophets, of the house of Ahab (2Kings ix. 10).
It is the fact, certainly, that the prophets' hatred of Baal
succeeded at last in overturning the dynasty of Omri. But in
what manner was this done? At a time when King Joram was
prevented by a wound he had received from being with his army in
the field, a messenger of Elisha went to the camp, called the
captain apart from a banquet at which he found him, to a secret
interview, and anointed him king. When Jehu returned to his
comrades at their wine, they asked him what that mad fellow had
wanted, and, his evasive answers failing to satisfy them, he told
them the truth. They at once raised him on an improvised throne,
and caused the trumpets to proclaim him king: they were quite
ready for such an exploit, not that they cared in the least for
"that mad fellow." Jehu justified their confidence by his
astounding mastery in treachery and bloodshed, but he placed his
reliance entirely on the resources of his own talent for murder.
He was not borne along by any general movement against the dynasty;
the people, which he despised (x. 9), stood motionless and horrified
at the sight of the crimes which came so quickly one after another;
even a hundred years afterwards the horror at the massacre of Jezreel
still lived (Hosea i. 4). The crown once gained, the reckless
player showed his gratitude to the fanatics, and sent the priests
and worshippers of Baal after the priests of Jehovah whom he had
slaughtered along with all belonging to the royal house (x. 11).
The manner in which he led them into the snare (x. 18 seq.) shows
that no one had thought before this of regarding him as the
champion of Jehovah; and even at this time his zeal was manifestly
only ostensible: he was not fighting for an idea (x. 15.
seq.). Thus we see that Baal did not bring about the fall of
the house of Ahab, but common treason; the zealots employed for
their purposes a most unholy instrument, which employed them in
turn as a holy instrument for its purposes; they did not
succeed in rousing the people to a storm against Baal, far from it.
The execution of Naboth seems to have excited greater indignation:
it was a crime against morals, not against religion. Even in the
history of Elijah the admission is made that this struggle
against Baal, in spite of his sacrificial victory on Carmel, was
in the end without result, and that only the judicial murder of
Naboth brought about a change in the popular sentiment. But
according to 2Kings ix. 25, this murder proved a momentous event,
not because it led, as we should expect, to a popular agitation,
but from the fortuitous circumstance that Jehu was a witness of the
never-to-be-forgotten scene between Ahab and Elijah, and seemed
therefore to the prophets to be a fit person to carry out his
threatenings.
It is certainly the case that the grand figure of Elijah could not
have been drawn as we have it except from the impression produced
by a real character. /1/ But it is too much torn away from the
*************************************
1. The distance of the narrator is not so very great in point of
time from the events he deals with. He is a North-Israelite, as
the )#R LYHWDH of xix. 3 shows: this may also be gathered from
xix. 8 compared with Deuteronomy i. 2. A man of Judah could not
easily make so considerable a mistake about the distance, though
we have to remember that with this narrator the situation of
Horeb can scarcely have been that which we have long been
accustomed to assume. Another sign of antiquity is the way in
which Elijah is represented as combating Baal in Israel, and in
the land of Sidon associating with the worshippers of Baal on the
most friendly terms (Luke iv. 25 seq.).
*********************************************
historical position it belongs to, and is thereby magnified to
colossal proportions. It may be said of this class of narratives
generally, that the prophets are brought too much into the foreground
in them, as if they had been even in their lifetime the principal
force of Israelite history, and as if the influence which moved
them had ruled and pervaded their age as well. That was not the case;
in the eyes of their contemporaries they were completely overshadowed
by the kings; only to later generations did they become the principal
personages. They were important ideally, and influenced the future
rather than the present; but this was not enough, a real tangible
importance is attributed to them. In the time of Ahab and Jehu the
Nebiim were a widespread body, and organised in orders of their own,
but were not highly respected; the average of them were miserable
fellows, who ate out of the king's hand and were treated with disdain
by members of the leading classes. Amos of Tekoa, who, it is true,
belonged to a younger generation, felt it an insult to be counted
one of them. Elijah and Elisha rose certainly above the level of
their order; but the first, whose hands remained pure, while he no
doubt produced a great impression at the time by his fearless words,
effected nothing against the king, and quite failed to draw the
people over to his side: while Elisha, who did effect something,
made use of means which could not bear the light, and which attest
rather the weakness than the strength of prophecy in Israel.
VII.III.4. Let us conclude by summing up the results to which we
have been led by our eclectic pilgrimage through the historical
books. What in the common view appears to be the specific character
of Israelite history, and has chiefly led to its being called sacred
history, rests for the most part on a later re-painting of the
original picture. The discolouring influences begin early. I do
not reckon among these the entrance of mythical elements, such as
are not wanting even in the first beginnings to which we can trace
the course of the tradition, nor the inevitable local colour,
which is quite a different thing from tendency. I think only of
that uniform stamp impressed on the tradition by men who regarded
history exclusively from the point of view of their own
principles. Here we observe first a religious influence, which in
the Books of Samuel and Kings turns out to be the prophetical
one. The view appears to me erroneous that it is to the prophets
that the Hebrew people owe their history as a whole. The song,
Judges v., though perhaps the oldest historical monument in the Old
Testament, cannot be cited in support of that view, for even if it
were actually composed by Deborah, the seer stands in no connection
with the prophets. Least of all can the colleges of the B'ne Nebiim
at Gilgal and other places be regarded as nurseries of historic
tradition: the products which are to be traced to these circles
betray a somewhat narrow field of vision (2Kings ii., iv. 1-6, 23).
The prophets did not form the tradition at first, but came after,
shedding upon it their peculiar light. Their interest in history
was not so great that they felt it necessary to write it down;
they only infused their own spirit into it subsequently.
But the systematic recoining of the tradition was only effected
when a firmer stamp had become available than the free ideas of
the prophets, the will of God having been formulated in writing.
When this point was reached, no one could fail to see the
discrepancy between the ideal commencement, which was now sought
to be restored as it stood in the book, and the succeeding
development. The old books of the people, which spoke in the most
innocent way of the most objectionable practices and
institutions, had to be thoroughly remodelled according to the
Mosaic form, in order to make them valuable, digestible, and
edifying, for the new generation. A continuous revision of them
was made, not only in the Chronicles, at the beginning of the
Greek domination, but, as we have seen in this chapter, even in
the Babylonian exile. The style of the latter revision differed
from that of the former. In Chronicles the past is remodelled on
the basis of the law: transgressions take place now and then, but
as exceptions from the rule. In the Books of Judges, Samuel, and
Kings, the fact of the radical difference of the old practice from
the law is not disputed. In these works also the past is in some
cases remodelled on the basis of the ideal, but as a rule it is
simply condemned. That is one difference; another has to be
added which is of far greater importance. In the Chronicles the
pattern according to which the history of ancient Israel is
represented is the Pentateuch, i.e. the Priestly Code. In the
source of Chronicles, in the older historical books, the revision
does not proceed upon the basis of the Priestly Code, which indeed
is completely unknown to them, but on the basis of Deuteronomy.
Thus in the question of the order of sequence of the two great
bodies of laws, the history of the tradition leads us to the same
conclusion as the history of the cultus.
CHAPTER VIII. THE NARRATIVE OF THE HEXATEUCH.
In the historical books the tradition is developed by means of
supplement and revision; double narratives occur here and there,
but not great parallel pieces of connected matter side by side.
In the Hexateuch additions and supplements have certainly taken
place on the most extensive scale, but the significant feature
is here that continuous narratives which can and must be understood
each by itself are woven together in a double or threefold cord.
Critics have shown a disposition, if not in principle yet in fact,
to take the independence of these so-called sources of the Hexateuch
as if it implied that in point of matter also each is a distinct
and independent source. But this is, even _a priori_, very
improbable. Even in the case of the prophets who received their
word from the Lord the later writer knows and founds upon the earlier
one. How much more must this be the case with narrators whose
express business is with the tradition? Criticism has not done
its work when it has completed the mechanical distribution; it
must aim further at bringing the different writings when thus
arranged into relation with each other, must seek to render them
intelligible as phases of a living process, and thus to make it
possible to trace a graduated development of the tradition.
The striking agreement of the different works, not only in
matter, but in their arrangement of the narratives, makes the
office of criticism as now described not less but more necessary.
There is no primitive legend, it is well known, so well knit as the
biblical one, and thus it is no wonder that it became the frame
for many others and infused into them some of its own colour.
This connection is common in its main features to all the sources
alike. The Priestly Code runs, as to its historical thread,
quite parallel to the Jehovist history. This alone made it
possible to interfuse the two writings as we now have them in the
Pentateuch. That this was not done altogether without violence
is less to be wondered at than that the violence which was done
is so small, and particularly that the structure of each writing
is left almost unimpaired. This can only be explained from the
intimate agreement of the two works in point of plan. When the
subject treated is not history but legends about pre-historic
times, the arrangement of the materials does not come with the
materials themselves, but must arise out of the plan of a
narrator: even the architecture of the generations, which forms
the scaffolding of Genesis, is not inseparably bound up with the
matters to be disposed of in it. From the mouth of the people
there comes nothing but the detached narratives, which may or may
not happen to have some bearing on each other: to weave them
together in a connected whole is the work of the poetical or
literary artist. Thus the agreement of the sources in the plan
of the narrative is not a matter of course, but a matter requiring
explanation, and only to be explained on the ground of the
literary dependence of one source on the other. The question how
this relation of dependence is to be defined is thus a much more
pressing one than is commonly assumed. /1/
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1. The agreement extends not only to the thread of the narrative,
but also to particulars, and even to expressions. I do not speak
of _mabbul_ (flood), or _tebah_ (ark), but the following examples
have struck me:-In Q Genesis vi. 9, Noah is said to be _righteous
in his generations_, in J E vii. 1 he is _righteous in his generation_--
an unusual form of speech, which gave a vast amount of trouble to
the Rabbins and to Jerome. Similarly Q Genesis xvii. 21, _the son
whom Sarah shall bear at this set time next year_, and JE xviii. 14:
_at the same time I will come to thee again next year, and then
Sarah shall have a son_. In the same way Q Exodus vi. 12 vii. 1.
(Moses) _I am of uncircumcised lips_. (Jehovah) _See, I make thee
a god to Pharaoh, and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet_;
compared with JE iv. 10, 16. (Moses) _I am slow of speech, and of
a slow tongue_; (Jehovah) _Aaron shall be to thee instead of a mouth,
and thou shalt be to him instead of God_. Comp. Genesis xxvii. 46,
with xxv: 22.
*************************************
This, however, is not the place to attempt a history of the
development of the Israelite legend. We are only to lay the
foundation for such a work, by comparing the narrative of the
Priestly Code with the Jehovistic one. In doing so we shall see
that Buttmann (Mythologus, i. p. 122 seq.) is right in asserting
against de Wette (Beitraege, ii.), that, the Jehovistic form of the
legend is the earlier of the two . /2/
****************************************
2. The line indicated by Buttmann was first taken up again by
Th. Noldeke in his Essay on the main-stock of the Pentateuch,
which opened the way to a proper estimate of the narrative part
of the work.
****************************************
VIII.I.
VIII.I.1 The Bible begins with the account of the Priestly Code of the
creation of the world. In the beginning is chaos; darkness,
water, brooding spirit, which engenders life, and fertilises the
dead mass. The primal stuff contains in itself all beings, as yet
undistinguished: from it proceeds step by step the ordered
world; by a process of unmixing, first of all by separating out
the great elements. The chaotic primal gloom yields to the
contrast of light and darkness; the primal water is separated by
the vault of heaven into the heavenly water, out of which there
grows the world above the firmament which is withdrawn from our
gaze, and the water of the earth: the latter, a slimy mixture, is
divided into land and sea, whereupon the land at once puts on its
green attire. The elements thus brought into existence, light,
heaven, water, land, are then enlivened, pretty much in the order
in which they were created, with individual beings; to the light
correspond the lamps of the stars, fishes to the water, to the
heaven the birds of heaven, and the other creatures to the land.
The last act of creation is markedly emphasised. "And God said:
Let us make man after our likeness; and let them have dominion
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over
the cattle, and over all the living creatures of the earth, and
over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God
created man after His own image, in the image of God created He
him, and He created them male and female. And God blessed them,
and said: Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and
subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over
the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon
the face of the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given unto
you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the
earth, and every tree with seed-fruits: to you it shall be for
food: and to every beast of the earth and to every fowl of the
air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there
is life, I have given the green herb for meat. Thus the heavens
and the earth were made and all the host of them, and on the
seventh day God ended His work, and blessed the seventh day, and
hallowed it." (Genesis i. 1-ii. 4a).
It is commonly said that the aim of this narrative is a purely
religious one. The Israelite certainly does not deny himself in
it: the religious spirit with which it is penetrated even comes
at some points into conflict with the nature of its materials.
The notion of chaos is that of uncreated matter; here we find
the remarkable idea that it is created in the beginning by God.
Brooded over by the Spirit, it is further of a nature for development
to take place out of it, and the trait that the creation is
represented throughout as a separation of elements which in chaos
were mixed together, betrays even now the original design: but
in the Hebrew narrative the immanent Spirit has yielded to the
transcendent God, and the principle of evolution is put aside in
favour of the fiat of creation. Yet for all this the aim of the
narrator is not mainly a religious one. Had he only meant to say
that God made the world out of nothing, and made it good, he could
have said so in simpler words, and at the same time more distinctly.
There is no doubt that he means to describe the actual course of
the genesis of the world, and to be true to nature in doing so;
he means to give a cosmogonic theory. Whoever denies this confounds
two different things--the value of history for us, and the aim of the
writer. While our religious views are or seem to be in conformity
with his, we have other ideas about the beginning of the world,
because we have other ideas about the world itself, and see in the
heavens no vault, in the stars no lamps, nor in the earth the
foundation of the universe. But this must not prevent us from
recognising what the theoretical aim of the writer of Genesis i.
really was. He seeks to deduce things as they are from each
other: he asks how they are likely to have issued at first from
the primal matter, and the world he has before his eyes in doing
this is not a mythical world but the present and ordinary one.
The pale colour which generally marks the productions of the
earliest reflection about nature, when they are not mythical
theories, is characteristic of Genesis i. also. We are indeed
accustomed to regard this first leaf of the Bible as surrounded
with all the charm that can be derived from the combination of high
antiquity and childlike form. lt would be vain to deny the
exalted ease and the uniform greatness that give the narrative its
character. The beginning especially is incomparable: "The
earth was without form and void, and darkness lay upon the deep,
and the Spirit of God moved upon the water. Then God said: Let
there be light, and there was light." But chaos being given, all
the rest is spun out of it: all that follows is reflection,
systematic construction; we can easily follow the calculation
from point to point. The considerations are very simple which
lead the writer to make first what is great appear, and then what
is small; first the foundation and then that which exists upon it,
the water before the fishes, heaven before the birds of heaven,
land and plants before the animals. The arrangement of the things
to be explained stands here for the explanation; there is nothing
more than a succession which proceeds from the simple to the
complicated; there is no effort of fancy to describe the process
more closely; everywhere cautious consideration which shrinks
from going beyond generalities. Only the framework of creation,
in fact, is given; it is not filled up. Hence also the form of
the whole, the effect of which cannot be reproduced in an epitome;
the formula gets the better of the contents, and instead of
descriptions our ears are filled with logical definitions. The
graduated arrangement in separating particular things out of chaos
indicates the awakening of a "natural" way of looking at nature,
and of a reasoned reflection about natural objects, just as this
is manifest in the attempts of Thales and his successors, which
are also remarkable as beginnings of the theory of nature and of
an objective interest in the things of the outer world, but further
than this do not exactly rouse us to enthusiasm. /1/
***********************************************
1. "There is nothing whatever in the piece that merits the name of
invention but the chronological order of the various creations."
Buttmann, p. 133.
**********************************************
The first sentence of the Jehovistic account of the beginning of
the world's history has been cut off by the reviser. [It was
all a dry waste] when Jehovah formed the earth, and nowhere did
the green herb spring up, for Jehovah had not yet caused it to
rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.
But a mist (?) went up out of the earth, and watered the face of
the ground. And Jehovah formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Then he planted a
garden far to the eastward in Eden, in the place where the four
chief rivers of the earth part asunder from their common source;
there grow among other fine trees the tree of life and the tree of
knowledge. In this garden Jehovah placed the man, to dress it and
keep it and to eat of all the trees, forbidding him to eat of the
fruit of the tree of knowledge only. But the man is utterly
alone in his garden: he must have company that is suitable for
him. So Jehovah first forms the beasts, if perchance the man will
associate with them and make friends with them. He brings them to
him one after another to see what impression they make on him,
and what the man will call them. He calls them by their right
names, ox, ass, bear, thus expressing his feeling that he finds
in them nothing relate to himself, and Jehovah has to seek other
counsel. Then he forms the woman out of a rib of the sleeping man,
and causes him to awake. Wearied as it were by all the fruitless
experiments with the beasts, the man cries out delighted when he
looks at the woman: This surely is flesh of my flesh and bone of
my bone; she may be called wo-man.
Thus the scene is drawn, the persons introduced, and an action
secretly prepared: now the tragedy begins, which ends with the
expulsion of man from the garden. Seduced by the serpent, man
stretches out his hand after the food which is forbidden him, in
order to become like God, and eats of the tree of knowledge. The
first consequence of this is the beginning of dress, the first step
in civilisation; other and sadder consequences soon follow. In
the evening the man and his wife hear Jehovah walking in the
garden; they hide before Him, and by doing so betray
themselves. It is useless to think of denying what has taken
place, and as each of them puts the blame on the other, they show
themselves one after the other to be guilty. The sentence of the
judge concludes the investigation. The serpent is to creep on its
belly, to eat dust, and to perish in the unequal contest with man.
The woman is to bear many children with sorrow, and to long for
the man, who yet will be her tyrant. The principal curse is
directed against the man. "Cursed be the ground for thy sake: in
sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns
also and thistles shall it bring forth to, thee, and thou shalt
eat the herb of the field, till thou return unto the ground, for
out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt
thou return." Sentence being thus spoken, Jehovah prepares the man
and woman for their future life by making coats of skins to dress
them with. Then turning to His celestial company, "Behold," He
says, "the man is become like one of us to know good and evil;
and now lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of
life, and eat, and live for ever." With these words he drives man
out of Paradise, and places before it the cherubs, and the flaming
sword, which turns every way, to keep the way of the tree of
Life (Genesis i. 4b-iii. 24).
The gloomiest view of life as it now is, lies at the root of this
story. Man's days are mere hardship and labour and task-work, a
task-work with no prospect of relief, for the only reward of it
is that he returns to the earth from which he was taken. No
thought appears of any life AFTER death, and life WITHOUT death
might have been, but has been forfeited, now the cherub guards
the approach to the tree of life, of which man might have eaten
when in Paradise but did not. This actual, cheerless lot of man
upon the earth is the real problem of the story. It is felt to be
the very opposite of our true destiny; at first, things must have
been otherwise. Man's lot now is a perversion of what it was at
first, it is the punishment of primeval guilt now resting on us all.
At first man lived in Paradise; he had a happy existence, and one
worthy of his nature, and held familiar intercourse with Jehovah;
it was his forbidden striving after the knowledge of good and evil
that drove him out of Paradise and brought all his miseries upon him.
What is the knowledge of good and evil? The commentators say it
is the faculty of moral distinction,--conscience, in fact. They
assume accordingly that man was in Paradise morally indifferent,
in a state which allowed of no self-conscious action and could not
be called either good or evil. A state like this not being an
ideal one, some of them consider that man gained more than he lost
by the fall, while others admit that it could not be the divine
intention to keep him always at this stage of childish
irresponsibility, and that this cannot be the view of the narrator
either.
But it is plain that the narrator is not speaking of a relative
prohibition of knowledge, but an absolute one: he means that it
is only for God, and that when man stretches out his hand towards
it he is transcending his limits and seeking to be as God. On the
other side he cannot of course mean to say that conscience is a
doubtful blessing, and its possession to be deplored, or that it is
a thing that God in fact refuses to men and reserves to Himself
alone. The knowledge spoken of cannot be moral knowledge. What
could the assertion mean that God would have no one but Himself
know the difference between good and evil, and would deny to man
this knowledge? One would think that conscience is a thing
belonging specifically to man and not to God.
And what could be the sense of representing Adam and Eve as so
intent to know what was sin and what was virtue? No one is
curious about that, and sin never came into existence in the way
of ethical experiment, by men's desiring to know what it is. And
it is manifestly assumed that men knew in paradise that obedience
to Jehovah was good and disobedience evil. And finally, it
conflicts with the common tradition of all peoples to represent the
first man as a sort of beast; he is regarded as undeveloped only in
point of outward culture. The knowledge which is here forbidden is
rather knowledge as such, general knowledge, or getting the eyes
opened, as it is afterwards called. This is what transcends, in
the writer's view, the limits of our nature; prying out the secret
of things, the secret of the world, and overlooking, as it were,
God's hand to see how He goes to work in His living activity, so as,
perhaps, to learn His secret and imitate Him. For knowledge is to
the ancient world also power, and no mere metaphysic. This knowing
in the highest sense is the attribute of God alone, who stands in
the creative centre of things and penetrates and surveys the whole;
it is sealed to man, who has to labour and weary himself at little
things. And yet the forbidden good has the most powerful
attraction for him; he burns to possess it, and instead of
resigning himself in trust and reverence he seeks to steal the
jewel which is jealously guarded from him, and so to become like
God--to his own sorrow.
This explanation is not new; it is the old and popular one, for
which reason also Goethe adopted it in Faust. One objection
certainly may be taken to it; the words are not merely
_knowledge_, but _knowledge of good and evil_. But good and evil
in Hebrew mean primarily nothing more than salutary and hurtful;
the application of the words to virtue and sin is a secondary
one, these being regarded as serviceable or hurtful in their
effects. Good and evil as spoken of in Genesis ii. iii. point
to no contrast of some actions with others according to their
moral distinctions: the phrase is only a comprehensive one for
things generally, according to the contradictory attributes which
constitute their interest to man, as they help or injure him:
for, as said, he desires to know not what things are
metaphysically, but what is the use of them. /1/ Besides the
***************************************
I Sur. 20, 91. Hudh. 22, 10 (Agh. xv. 105, 12). Hamasa, 292,
8 seq. Tabari i. 847, 18
***************************************
lengthier expression we have the shorter one, knowledge, simply
(iii. 6); and it must also be remarked that the phrase is not:
know the good and the evil, but know good and evil.
But more, we must regard this knowledge not as it affects the
individual, but in the light of history; what is meant is what we
call civilisation. As the human race goes forward in
civilisation, it goes backward in the fear of God. The first step
in civilisation is clothing; and here this is the first result of
the fall. The story is continued in chapter iv. Adam's sons
begin to found cities, Jubal is the first musician, Cain discovers
the oldest and the most important of the arts, that of the smith--
hence the sword and bloody vengeance. Of the same tendency is the
connected story of the city and the tower of Babel, in which is
represented the foundation of the great empires and cities of the
world, which concentrate human strength and seek to use it to press
into heaven itself. In all this we have the steps of man's
emancipation; with his growing civilisation grows also his alienation
from the highest good; and--this is evidently the idea, though it
is not stated--the restless advance never reaches its goal after all;
it is a Sisyphus-labour; the tower of Babel, which is incomplete
to all eternity, is the proper symbol for it. The strain is that
strain of unsatisfied longing which is to be heard among all
peoples. On attaining to civilisation they become aware of the
value of those blessings which they have sacrificed for it. /1/
***************************************
1. Dillmann thinks this idea insipid: Genesis (1882), p. 44
**************************************
It was necessary to discuss the notion of knowledge at some
length, because the misunderstanding of this point on the part of
philosophers and theologians has cast over our story an
appearance of modernness, which has, in its turn, done something
to influence general opinion as to the age of this story compared
with the other. Having got rid of this impression we turn to
those features of Genesis ii. iii. which help to determine
positively its relation to chapter i.
What has been untruly asserted of Genesis i. is true of Genesis ii.
iii. The Jehovist narrative does shine by the absence of all
efforts after rationalistic explanation, by its contempt for
every kind of cosmological speculation. The earth is regarded as
being at first not moist and plastic but (as in Job xxxviii. 38)
hard and dry: it must rain first in order that the desert may be
turned into a green meadow, as is the case still every year when
the showers of spring come. The ground further requires
cultivation by man that the seed may spring forth. No regard is
paid to any natural sequence of the acts of creation: man, the
most helpless of all beings, appears first, and finds himself
placed on a world entirely bare, without tree or bush, without
the animals, without woman. Man is confessedly the exclusive
object of interest, the other creatures are accounted for by
their importance to him, as if this only conferred on them a
right to exist. The idea explains matter: mechanical possibility
is never consulted, and we do not think of asking about it. Want
of taste could find no lower deeps than when this or that scholar
goes from Genesis ii. 21 to count his ribs, or comes to
the conclusion that the first man was hermaphrodite.
In the first account we stand before the first beginnings of sober
reflection about nature, in the second we are on the ground of
marvel and myth. Where reflection found its materials we do not
think of asking; ordinary contemplation of things could furnish
it. But the materials for myth could not be derived from
contemplation, at least so far as regards the view of nature which
is chiefly before us here; they came from the many-coloured
traditions of the old world of Western Asia. Here we are in the
enchanted garden of the ideas of genuine antiquity; the fresh
early smell of earth meets us on the breeze. The Hebrews breathed
the air which surrounded them; the stories they told on
the Jordan, of the land of Eden and the fall, were told in the same
way on the Euphrates and the Tigris, on the Oxus and the Arius.
The true land of the world, where dwells the Deity, is Eden. It
was not removed from the earth after the fall; it is there still,
else whence the need of cherubs to guard the access to it? The
rivers that proceed from it are real rivers, all well known to the
narrator, they and the countries they flow through and the
products that come from these countries. Three of them, the Nile,
the Euphrates, and the Tigris, are well known to us also; and if
we only knew how the narrator conceived their courses to lie, it
would be easy to determine the position of their common source and
the situation of Paradise. Other peoples of antiquity define the
situation of their holy land in a similar manner; the streams
have different names, but the thing is the same. The wonderful
trees also in the garden of Eden have many analogies even in the
Germanic mythology. The belief in the cherubs which guard
Paradise is also widely diffused. _Krub_ is perhaps the same name,
and certainly represents the same idea, as _Gryp_ in Greek, and
_Grei_f in German. We find everywhere these beings wonderfully
compounded out of lion, eagle, and man. They are everywhere
guardians of the divine and sacred, and then also of gold and of
treasures. The ingredients of the story seem certainly to have
parted with some of their original colour under the influence of
monotheism. The Hebrew people no doubt had something more to tell
about the tree of life than now appears. It is said to have been
in the midst of the garden, and so it seems to have stood at the
point whence the four streams issued, at the fountain of life,
which was so important to the faith of the East, and which
Alexander marched out to discover. Paradise, moreover, was
certainly not planted originally for man, it was the dwelling of
the Deity Himself. Traces of this may still be recognised.
Jehovah does not descend to it from heaven, but goes out walking
in the garden in the evening as if He were at home. The garden of
Deity is, however, on the whole somewhat naturalised. A similar
weakening down of the mythic element is apparent in the matter of
the serpent; it is not seen at once that the serpent is a demon.
Yet parting with these foreign elements has made the story no
poorer, and it has gained in noble simplicity. The mythic
background gives it a tremulous brightness: we feel that we are
in the golden age when heaven was still on earth; and yet
unintelligible enchantment is avoided, and the limit of a sober
chiaroscuro is not transgressed.
The story of the creation in six days played, we know, a great
part in the earlier stages of cosmological and geological science.
It is not by chance that natural science has kept off Genesis ii.
iii. There is scarcely any nature there. But poetry has at
all times inclined to the story of Paradise. Now we do not
require to ask at this time of day, nor to argue the question,
whether mythic poetry or sober prose is the earlier stage in the
contemplation of the world.
Intimately connected with the advanced views of nature, which we
find in Genesis i., is the "purified" notion of God found there.
The most important point is that a special word is employed, which
stands for nothing else than the creative agency of God, and so
dissociates it from all analogy with human making and shaping--
a word of such exclusive significance that it cannot be reproduced
either in Latin, or in Greek, or in German. In a youthful people
such a theological abstraction is unheard of; and so with the
Hebrews we find both the word and the notion only coming into use
after the Babylonian exile; they appear along with the emphatic
statement of the creative omnipotence of Jehovah with reference to
nature, which makes its appearance, we may say suddenly, in the
literature of the exile, plays a great part in the Book of Job,
and frequently presents itself in Isaiah xl.-lxvi. In Genesis ii.
iii., not nature but man is the beginning of the world and of
history; whether a creation out of nothing is assumed there at
all, is a question which only the mutilation of the commencement
(before ii. 4b) makes it not quite impossible to answer in the
affirmative. At any rate it is not the case here that the command
of the Creator sets things in motion at the first so that they
develop themselves to separate species out of the universal chaos;
Jehovah Himself puts His hand to the work, and this supposes that
the world in its main features was already in existence. He plants
and waters the garden, He forms man and breathes life into his
nostrils, He builds the woman out of the man's rib, having made
a previous attempt, which was unsuccessful, to provide him with
company; the beasts are living witnesses of the failure of His
experiments. In other respects, too, He proceeds like a man.
In the evening when it grows cool He goes to walk in the garden,
and when there discovers by chance the transgression which has
taken place, and holds an investigation in which He makes not
the least use of His omniscience. And when He says:
"Behold, the man is become like one of us to know good and evil:
and now lest he stretch forth his hand, and take of the tree of
life, and eat and live for ever,"
that is not said in irony, any more than when He expresses
Himself on the occasion of the building of Babel;
"Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language,
and this is only the beginning of their doings, and now nothing
will be too difficult for them that they have imagined to do;
go to, let us go down and confound their language."
That at the same time the majesty of Jehovah is in no way compromised
is the mystery of poetic genius. How would the colourless God of
abstraction fare in such a situation ?
The treatment, finally, of the microcosm in the two accounts,
reflects the difference between them. In chapter i. man is
directed at the very outset to the ground on which he moves to
this day: "Replenish the earth, and subdue it," he is told; a
perfectly natural task. In chaps. ii. iii. he is placed in
Paradise, and his sphere of activity there, nestled, as he may
be said still to be, in the lap of the Deity, is very limited.
The circumstances of his life as it now is, the man's toil in the
fields, the woman's toil in bearing children, do not answer to his
original destiny; they are not a blessing, but a curse. In the
Jehovistic narrative man is as wonderful to himself as the
external world; in the other he is as much a matter of course as
it is. In the one he sees astonishing mysteries in the difference
of the sexes, in marriage, in child-birth (iv. 1); in the other
these are physiological facts which raise no questions or
reflections: "He made them male and female, and said, Be
fruitful and multiply." There his attitude towards the beasts
is one of mixed familiarity and bewilderment; he does not know
exactly what to make of them; they are allied to him and yet
not quite suitable society for him; here they are beings not
related to him, over which he rules.
The chief point in which the difference between the two accounts
comes to a head is this. In Genesis ii. iii., man is virtually
forbidden to lift the veil of things, and to know the world,
represented in the tree of knowledge. In Genesis i. this is the
task set him from the beginning; he is to rule over the whole
earth, and rule and knowledge come to the same thing--they mean
civilisation. There nature is to him a sacred mystery: here it
is a mere fact, an object; he is no longer bewildered over
against nature, but free and superior. There it is a robbery for
man to seek to be equal with God: here God makes him at first in
His own image and after His own likeness, and appoints him His
representative in the realm of nature. We cannot regard it as
fortuitous that in this point Genesis i. asserts the opposite of
Genesis ii. iii.; the words spoken with such emphasis, and
repeated i. 27, v. 1, ix. 6, sound exactly like a protest
against the view underlying Genesis ii. iii., a protest to be
explained partly by the growth of moral and religious
cultivation, but partly also no doubt due to the convulsive
efforts of later Judaism to deny that most firmly established of
all the lessons of history, that the sons suffer for the sins of
the fathers. /1/
*****************************************
1. A coarser counterpart to Genesis ii. iii, is Genesis vi. 1-4.
Here also there is a kind of fall of man in an attempt to overpass
the boundary between the human race and the divine. In the priestly
narrative (Q) the gulf between spirit, which is divine substance,
and flesh, which is human substance, is bridged over by the doctrine
of man's creation in the image of God.
*****************************************
What are generally cited as points of superiority in Genesis i.
over Genesis ii. iii. are beyond doubt signs of progress in outward
culture. The mental individuality of the two writers, the systematiser
and the genius, cannot be compared, and the difference in this
respect tells nothing of their respective dates; but in its general
views of God, nature, and man, Genesis i. stands on a higher,
certainly on a later, level. To our way of thinking its views are
more intelligible, simpler, more natural, and on this account they
have been held to be also older. But this is on the one hand to
identify naturalness with originality, two things which every one
knows not to be the same, and on the other hand it is applying
a standard to prehistoric tradition which applies to historical
tradition only: freedom from miracle and myth count in favour
of the latter, but not of the former. But the secret root of the
manifest preference long shown by historic-critical theology for
Genesis i. appears to lie in this, that scholars felt themselves
responsible for what the Bible says, and therefore liked it to
come as little as possible in conflict with general culture. /1/
********************************************
1. I merely assert that Genesis ii. iii. is prior to Genesis i.;
I do not believe the story of Paradise and of the Fall to be very
old with the Israelites. We are led to think so by the fact that
the man and the woman stand at the head of the genealogy of the
human race; a place we should rather expect to be assigned to the
serpent (according to primitive Semitic belief the serpent was by
no means opposed to God). This is the case in the Chronicon
Edessenum and in Abyssinian legend, and a trace of this is perhaps
preserved in the name of Eve, as Noldeke thinks. The name
certainly receives this interpretation in Philo (de agric. Noe,
# 21) and in the Midrash Rabba on Genesis iii. 20 (D. M. Z. 1877,
p. 239, 326). Moreover, the true seat of God to the Hebrews was
Mount Sinai, and the original Hebrew life was the nomadic life of
the patriarchs, not gardening or agriculture. And finally we
cannot believe barbarians to have indulged in reflections on the
advantages and disadvantages of civilisation. The materials of
Genesis ii. iii. can hardly have been imported before the time
of Solomon. Where they came from we can scarcely guess; it
would be most natural to think of the Phoenicians or the
Canaanites generally, and this theory is favoured by Genesis iv.
But in JE Babel is regarded as the last home of the primitive
human race, Eden and Nod having preceded it; and the Hebrews
probably derived the legend in the last instance from Babylon.
But this does not prove that this or that parallel brought forward
by Assyriologists is necessarily of value.
**********************************************
VIII.I.2. After the beginning of the world we have in Genesis i.-xi.,
both in the Priestly Code and in the Jehovist, the transition from
Adam to Noah (chapters iv. v.), then the flood (vi.-ix.), then the
transition from Noah to Abraham (chapters x. xi.).
In the dry names, which are enumerated in Genesis v. and Genesis iv.
Buttmann recognised the remains of an historical connection once
woven together out of primitive stories. These narratives were
evidently mythological: their original contents are destroyed
both in Genesis v. (Q) and in Genesis iv. (JE), but only the list
of the Jehovist now bears the appearance of a ruin. In the other
the fragments have been used for a careful new building in which
they no longer look like fragments. Here they are made to serve
as the pillars of a chronology which descends from Adam to Moses,
computing the period from the one to the other as 2666 years.
These 2666 years represent 26 2/3 generations of a hundred years
each: namely, 1-20 Adam to Abraham, 21 Isaac, 22 Jacob, 23 Levi,
24 Kohath, 25 Amram, 26 Aaron; the last 2/3 of a generation is
Eleazar, who was a man of mature years at the time of the Exodus.
/2/
**************************************
2. So Noldeke in the Jahrbb. fuer protest. Theol., 1875, p. 344.
Genesis xv. 13-16 expressly states that the generation is reckoned
as 100 years in this period.
**************************************
Such a chronology is totally at variance with the simplicity of the
legend. /1/ It is also evident, that if even in the case of the
*************************************
1. "Exact chronological dates are a sure sign of later working up
of old poetical legends." Buttmann, I. p. 181.
*************************************
historical books the systematic chronology is no older than the
period of the exile, that of the Pentateuch must be of still later
origin. For the historical period there were certain fixed points
for chronology to lay hold of; it cannot have begun with the
patriarchs and gone on to the kings, it must have begun with the
kings and then gone higher up to the patriarchs; it must have
begun at the lower end, where alone it had any firm ground to stand
on. The belief that the men of the early world lived to a great
age is no doubt old, but the settled chronology, based on the years
in which each patriarch begat his son, is an artifice in which we
manifestly see the doctrinaire treatment of history which was coming
into vogue for later periods, attempting to lay hold of the earliest
legends as well. Only when the living contents of the legend had
completely disappeared could its skeleton be used as a framework
of chronology.
Buttmann has also shown that the elements of the ten-membered
genealogy of Q (Genesis v.) and of the seven-membered of JE (Genesis
iv.) are identical. In Q, Noah comes after Lamech at the end, and
at the beginning Adam Cain is doubled and becomes Adam Seth Enos
Cainan. Adam and Enos being synonymous, this amounts to Adam Seth
Adam Cainan: that is to say Adam Seth are prefixed, and the
series begins anew with Enos Cainan, just as in JE. The Priestly
Code itself offers a remarkable testimony to the superior
originality of the Jehovist genealogy, by ascribing to Lamech,
here the ninth in order, the age of 777 years. This can only be
explained from JE, where Lamech is seventh in order, and moreover
specially connects himself with the number seven by his speech.
Cain is avenged seven times, and Lamech seventy times seven.
Another circumstance shows Q to be posterior to E. The first man
is called here not Ha Adam as in JE, but always Adam, without the
article (v. 1-5), a difference which Kuenen pertinently compares
with that between ho Xristos and Xristos. But in Q itself (Genesis
i.) the first man is only the generic man; if in spite of this
he is called simply Adam (Genesis v.), as if that were his proper
name, the only way to account for this is to suppose a
reminiscence of Genesis ii. iii., though here the personification
does not as yet extend to the name.
We come to the story of the flood, Genesis vi.-ix. In JE the flood
is well led up to: in Q we should be inclined to ask in surprise
how the earth has come all at once to be so corrupted, after being
so far in the best of order, did we not know from JE. In omitting
the fall, the fratricide of Cain, the sword-song of Lamech, the
intercourse of the sons of God with the daughters of men, and
parting with the distinctive gloomy colouring which is
unmistakably spread over the whole early history of man in JE,
the Priestly Code has entirely lost the preparation for the
flood, which now appears in the most abrupt and unaccountable way.
As to the contents of the story, the priestly version here agrees
to an unusual extent with the Jehovistic one; differing from it
chiefly in the artificial, mathematical marking out of the
framework. The flood lasts twelve months and ten days, i.e.,
exactly a solar year. It begins in the six hundredth year of
Noah, on the seventeenth of the second month, rises for one
hundred and fifty days, and begins to fall on the seventeenth of
the seventh month. On the first month the tops of the mountains
become visible; in the six hundred and first year, on the first
of the first month, the water has abated; on the twenty-seventh of
the second month the earth is dry. God Himself gives instructions
and measurements for the building of the ark, as for the
tabernacle: it is to be three stories high, and divided
throughout into small compartments; three hundred cubits long,
fifty cubits broad, thirty cubits high; and Noah is to make it
accurately according to the cubit. When the water is at its
height, on the seventeenth of the second month, the flood is
fifteen cubits above the highest mountains--Noah having apparently
not forgotten, in spite of his anxiety, to heave the lead and to
mark the date in his log-book. This prematurely modern measuring
and counting cannot be thought by any one to make the narrative
more lifelike; it simply destroys the illusion. All that is
idyllic and naive is consistently stripped off the legend as far
as possible. As the duration of the flood is advanced from forty
days (JE) to a whole year, its area also is immeasurably
increased. The Priestly Code states with particular emphasis that
it was quite universal, and went over the tops of the highest
mountains; indeed it is compelled to take this view by its
assumption that the human race was diffused from the first over
the whole earth. Such traits as the missions of the birds and the
broken-off olive-leaf are passed over: poetic legend is smoothed
down into historic prose. But the value and the charm of the story
depend on such little traits as these; they are not mere
incidents, to poetry they are the most important thing of all.
These are the features which are found just in the same way
in the Babylonian story of the flood; and if the Jehovist has a
much greater affinity with the Babylonian story than the Priestly
Code, that shows it to have preserved more faithfully the international
character of those early legends. This appears most plainly in
his accounting for the flood by the confounding of the boundaries
between spirit and flesh, and the intercourse of the sons of God
and the daughters of men: the Jehovist here gives us a piece, but
little adulterated, of mythical heathenism--a thing quite
inconceivable in Q.
The Priestly Code has the rainbow, which the Jehovist, as we now
have him, wants. But we have to remember that in Genesis vi.-ix.
the Jehovist account is mutilated, but the priestly one preserved
entire. If the rainbow occurred both in JE and in Q, one of the
accounts of it had to be omitted, and according to the editor's
usual procedure the omission had to be from JE. It is accordingly
very possible that it was not at first wanting in JE; it agrees
better, indeed, with the simple rain, which here brings about the
flood, than with the opening of the sluices of heaven and the
fountains of the deep, which produce it in Q, and it would stand
much better after viii. 21, 22 than after ix. 1-7. In the
Priestly Code, moreover, the meaning of the rainbow is half
obliterated. On the one hand, the story is clumsily turned into
history, and we receive the impression either that the rainbow
only appeared in the heavens at this one time after the flood, or
that it had been there ever since; on the other hand, it is made
the token of the covenant between Elohim and Noah, and the use of
language in other passages, with the analogy of Genesis xvii.,
would point to the covenant described in ix. 1-7: the rainbow
would then be the counterpart of circumcision. /1/ The covenant,
*************************************
1. The celestial bow is originally the instrument of the
arrow-darting God, and therefore a symbol of His hostility; but
He lays it out of His hand to signify that He has laid aside His
wrath, and it is a token of His reconciliation and favour. When
there has been such a storm that one might dread a repetition of
the flood, the rainbow appears in heaven, the sun, and grace,
breaking forth again. In the 0. T. Q#T has not the meaning of
a mere arc, it always means the war-bow. And what is most
important of all, the Arabs also always take the iris to be the
war-bow of God; Kuzah shoots arrows from his bow, and then hangs
it up in the clouds (D. M. Z. 1849, p. 200 seq.). With the Jews
and their kin, the rainbow has retained far into Christian times a
remarkably near relation to the Deity. It is singular that the
Edomites have a God named Kaus, as well as Kuzah.
*************************************
i.e., the law of ch. ix. 1-7, a modification of the first ordinance
given to Adam (i.229, 30) for the world after the flood which still
subsists, is for the Priestly Code the crown, the end, the substance,
of the whole narrative. Its interest in the law always completely
absorbs the simple interest of its story.
We have also to remark that in this source vengeance for the
spilling of blood is not the affair of the relatives but the
affair of God; and that it is demanded for man as man, whether
master or slave, and no money compensation allowed. The words
sound simple and solemn: "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man
shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made He man."
Yet the religious notion of HUMANITY underlying this sentence
is not ancient with the Hebrews any more than with other nations;
cf. Genesis iv. 15, 24, and Exodus xxi. 20 seq. /1/
*******************************************
1. De Wette, Beitrage, p. 57. The religious notion of the people
is old.
********************************************
The ark lands, according to Q, on Mount Ararat. In JE, as we have
it, no landing-place is named. But this is not original, as
mythic geography belongs to the Jehovist in all other passages
where it occurs. In Q the primitive history is never localised,
the whole earth is given to man for a dwelling from the first. In
JE, on the contrary, they live first in the land of Eden far to
the East, and presumably high up in the North; expelled from
Eden they come to the land of Nod, where Cain builds the town of
Enoch, and departing from this district, which is still far to the
East, they settle in the land of Shinar, at the mouths of the
Euphrates and Tigris, where they build the town of Babel. Shinar
is the point of departure of that history of the world which is
no longer merely mythical, it is the home of the present human
race. In this point the contrast is very noticeable between the
local definiteness of the Jehovist legend, which lends it the
character of the idyllic, and the vague generalness of the other.
In Shinar, according to JE, Genesis xi. 1-9, men are still all
together, and they desire to remain together there. Not to be
scattered, they build a great city, which is to hold them all;
and to make themselves a name, they add to it a high tower which
is to reach heaven. Jehovah, perceiving in these attempts the
danger of further progress in the same direction, comes down to
confound their language, and by such violent means brings about
the dispersion of the human race by the unity of which He feels
himself threatened. In Q it is understood that men are scattered
over the whole earth; they are never represented as all living at
one point, and pains are accordingly taken to describe the flood
as quite universal. The division of the people comes about quite
simply in the way of genealogy, and the division of the languages
is not the cause but the result of it. Accompanying this we find
once more a notable difference in point of mental attitude; what
JE regards as unnatural, and only to be understood as a violent
perversion of the original order, is in Q the most natural thing
in the world.
The period between the flood and Abraham is filled up in Q by
another ten-membered genealogy, which, to judge from the analogy
of Genesis iv., had probably only seven members in JE. It cannot
have been wanting there, and may have passed straight from Shem
to Heber, and left out the grandfather Nahor (x. 21, 24, xxiv.
15, xxix. 5), who is even less to be distinguished from his
grandson of the same name than Adam from Enos. The original
dwelling-place of the Terahites is, according to Q, not the
Mesopotamian Haran (Carrhae), as in JE (xii. 1, xxiv. 4), but Ur
Casdim, which can only mean Ur of the Chaldees. From there
Terah, the father of Abraham, Nahor, and Haran, is said to have
emigrated with Abraham and Lot, the son of Haran, who was already
dead. If this was so, Nahor must have stayed at Ur Casdim, and
Haran must have died there. But neither of these assumptions is
consistent with the indications of the narrative. The different
aspirates notwithstanding, it is scarcely allowable to separate
the man Haran from the town Haran and to make him die elsewhere.
It is equally impossible to regard Ur in Chaldaea as the
residence of Nahor, whether the grandfather or the grandson of the
same name matters nothing; for it is obviously not without
relation to real facts that the place, which in any case must be
in Syria, where the Nahorides Laban and Rebecca dwell, is called
in J the town of Nahor, and in E Haran. Even in Q though Nahor
stays in Ur, Laban and Rebecca do not live in Chaldaea, but in
Padan Aram, ie., in Mesopotamian Syria. What helps to show that
Ur Casdim does not belong to the original form of the tradition,
is that even in Serug the father of Nahor, we are far away from
Babylon towards the West. Serug is the name of a district which
borders Haran on the North; how can the son of Serug all at once
leap back to Ur Casdim? What the reasons were for making Babylon
Abraham's point of departure, we need not now consider; but after
having left Ur Casdim with Terah, it is curious how he only gets
as far as Haran, and stays there till his father's death. In Q
also it is from Haran that he enters Palestine. Here, if anywhere,
we have in the doubling of the point of departure an attempt to
harmonise and to gain a connection with JE.
VII.I.3. The view is happily gaining ground that, in the mythical
universal history of mankind in Genesis i.-xi., the Jehovist
version is more primitive than the priestly one. And we are, in
fact, compelled to adopt this view when we observe that the
materials of the narratives in question have not an Israelite, but
a universal ethnic origin. The traces of this origin are much
more distinctly preserved in the Jehovist, whence it comes that
comparative mythology occupies itself chiefly with his
narratives, though without knowing that it is doing so. The
primitive legend has certainly undergone alterations in his hands
too; its mythic character is much obliterated, and all sorts of
Israelite elements have crept in. Even the fratricide of Cain,
with the contrast in the background between the peaceful life of
the Hebrews in the land of Canaan and the restless wanderings of
the Cainites (Kenites) in the neighbouring desert, quite falls out
of the universal historical and geographical framework. Still
more does the curse of Canaan do so; here the trait is evidently
old, that Noah was the first to make wine, but this has been made
a merely subordinate feature of a pronouncedly national
Israelite narrative. But in the Jehovist the process of emptying
the primitive legend of its true meaning and contents has not gone
nearly so far as in the Priestly Code, where it actually creates
surprise when some mythic element shines through, as in the cases
of Enoch, and of the rainbow.
The mythic materials of the primitive world-history are suffused
in the Jehovist with a peculiar sombre earnestness, a kind of
antique philosophy of history, almost bordering on pessimism: as
if mankind were groaning under some dreadful weight, the pressure
not so much of sin as of creaturehood (vi. 1-4). We notice a shy,
timid spirit, which belongs more to heathenism. The rattling of
the chains at intervals only aggravates the feeling of confinement
that belongs to human nature; the gulf of alienation between man
and God is not to be bridged over. Jehovah does not stand high
enough, does not feel Himself secure enough, to allow the
earth-dwellers to come very near Him; there is almost a suggestion
of the notion of the jealousy of the gods. This mood, though in
many ways softened, is yet recognisable enough in Genesis ii. iii.,
in vi. 1-4, and xi. 1-9. In the Priestly Code it has entirely
disappeared; here man no longer feels himself under a secret curse,
but allied to God and free, as lord of nature. True, the Priestly
Code also recognises in its own fashion the power of sin--this we
saw in the chapter on sacrifice; but sin as the root of ruin,
explaining it and capable of being got rid of, is the very opposite
of blind, not-to-be-averted fate. The slavery of sin and the
freedom of the children of God are in the Gospel correlated. The
mythical mode of view is destroyed by the autonomy of morality;
and closely connected with this is the rational way of looking at
nature, of which we find the beginnings in the Priestly Code. This
view of nature presupposes that man places himself as a person over
and outside of nature, which he regards as simply a thing. We may
perhaps assert that were it not for this dualism of Judaism, mechanical
natural science would not exist.
The removal of colour from the myths is the same thing as the
process of Hebraising them. The Priestly Code appears to
Hebraise less than the Jehovist; it refrains on principle from
confounding different times and customs. But in fact it Hebraises
much more: it cuts and shapes the whole of the materials so that
they may serve as an introduction to the Mosaic legislation. It
is true that the Jehovist also placed these ethnic legends at the
entrance to his sacred legend, and perhaps selected them with a
view to their forming an introduction to it; for they are all
ethical and historical in their nature, and bear on the problems
of the world of man, and not the world of nature. /1/
*************************************
1 Yet it is possible the selection presented him with no difficulty,
since cosmological myths were not popular tales, but priestly
speculations, with which he was quite unacquainted.
***************************************
But with the Jehovist justice was yet done to some extent to the
individuality of the different narratives: in the Priestly Code
their individuality is not only modified to suit the purpose of
the whole, but completely destroyed. The connection leading up
to the Torah of Moses is everything, the individual pieces have
no significance but this. It follows of course from this mode of
treatment that the connection itself loses all living reality; it
consists, apart from the successive covenants, in mere genealogy
and chronology. De Wette thinks all this beautiful because it is
symmetrical and intelligible, and leads well up to a conclusion.
But this will not be every one's taste; there is such a thing as
poetical material without manufacture.
How loosely the narratives of the primitive history are connected
with each other in the Jehovist we see very clearly in the
section dealing with the flood. It disagrees both with what goes
before and with what follows it. The genealogy Genesis iv. 16-24
issues not in Noah but in Lamech; instead of Shem, Ham, and
Japhet, the sons of Noah, we have Jabal, Jubal, Tubal, the sons of
Lamech, as the inaugurators of the second period. We have also the
characteristic difference, that Shem, Ham, and Japhet give us a
division of mankind according to nations, while Jabal, Jubal, Tubal
give a division according to guilds, which are necessarily those
of the same people, as no people consists entirely of musicians
or entirely of smiths. And it is undoubtedly the aim of chapter
iv. 16 seq. to describe the origin of the present civilisation,
not of that which is extinct, having been destroyed by the flood.
Tubal-Cain is the father of the smiths of the present, not of
those before the flood; Jubal the father of the musicians, Jabal
of the shepherds of the narrator's own period; hence they stand
at the end of the genealogy and open the second period. But as
Genesis iv. 16-24 does not look forward to the flood, so neither
does Genesis xi. 1-9 (the building of the tower of Babel) look back
to it. This piece is obviously not the continuation of chapter x.
That chapter brought us to a point at which the earth was occupied
by different peoples and different tongues; and here (xi. 1) we
are suddenly carried back to a time when the whole earth was of
one language and one speech. Can this have been the time when
Noah's family made up the whole population of the earth? or in
other words, does xi. 1-9 go back before chap x. and join on to
vi.-ix.? Manifestly not: "the whole earth" (xi. 1) is not
merely Shem and Ham and Japhet; the multitude of men who seek by
artificial means to concentrate themselves, and are then split up
into different peoples, cannot consist of only one family. The
point of view is quite different from what it would be if chaps.
vi.-ix. were taken into account; the narrator knows nothing of
the flood, which left Noah's family alone surviving out of the
whole world. Nor would it avail to place xi. 1 at a period so
long subsequent to the flood that the family might have increased
again to a great people; even this would not give the requisite
connection with the idea of Noah and his three sons. If the latter
united themselves afterwards in one family, and one coherent
people thus grew out of them, which was then split up by a higher
power into different languages, then Shem, Ham, and Japhet
entirely lose their significance as the great heads of the
nations.
The fact is simply this, that the whole section of the flood
(Genesis vi.-ix.) is an isolated piece without any connection
with the rest of the narrative of the Jehovist. Another strange
erratic boulder is the intercourse of the sons of God with the
daughters of men (Genesis vi. 1-4). /l/ The connection between
*************************************
1 See p. 307, note.
*************************************
this piece and the story of the flood which follows it, is of the
loosest; and it is in entire disagreement with the preceding part
of the Jehovist narrative, as it tells of a second fall of man,
with a point of view morally and mentally so different from that
of the first, that this story can in no wise be regarded as
supplementing or continuing that one. In Genesis vi. 1-4 morality
has nothing to do with the guilt that is incurred. We have further
examples which illustrate the fragmentary character of the Jehovist
primitive history as we have it, in the story of the fratricide
of Cain, and the curse of Canaan, which indeed ought not to be
here at all, but belong by rights to the history of the
patriarchs.
We may close this section by reproducing the words in which
Buttmann (i. 208 seq.) indicates his disagreement with De Wette
in regard to the treatment of the early legends of the Bible:
they are well worth noting. "Thoroughly familiar with the
antiquities of the race in whose sacred writings these monuments
have been preserved to us, De Wette recognises and follows the
national spirit of that race in their most ancient records. In
this way he discovers amidst these ruins the thread of an old
connection, a kind of epos, the theme of which was the
glorification of the people of Israel, a theme which finds a
prelude even in the primitive history of the human race. This
view is of the first importance for the object he has before him,
which is the true criticism of these books; and for the moment
other considerations must necessarily yield to it. My object in
this whole investigation is only to find the universal element in
the legends of different nations, and especially to discover what
is common property in the myths of the different branches of the
great family of nations to which the Hebrews and the Greeks and we
ourselves alike belong. Thus each myth reveals itself
to me as existing for itself, having a basis and completeness of
its own, and even when I find it in other nations I at once assert
for it its character as already known to me. Thus De Wette and I
come to differ in the view we take of individual myths. To him they
commonly appear as spontaneous free inventions of individual men
for their own purposes; not in the ignoble sense in which the vulgar
view speaks of the religious narratives of ancient peoples, but free
inventions in which there is no intention to deceive. I, on the
contrary, can allow no invention in these oldest portions of
mythology. A true myth is never invented; it is handed down.
It is not true, but it is honest. From small elements which fancy
offered as true, these myths arose and grew, without any contributor
to their growth feeling that he had of himself added to them. Those
only had any conscious intention in the matter, who touched up the
oldest pure myths, and drew them into the great circle of their
national history; and their intention, though conscious, was quite
innocent and harmless, as De Wette describes it. Now De Wette
sees the chief traces of that unity, or of that national epos
which winds its way through the Mosaic history, in the Elohim
document. For his critical purpose, therefore, this document is
the most important, and it he for the most part follows. My aim
forbids me to attend to anything but the inner completeness of the
stories taken one by one, and this I see most clearly in the
Jehovah fragments; whence I have had to yield the preference to
them in the foregoing discussions. Should each of us attain his
end, our views will excellently supplement each other."
We may add that just that linked unity of its narrative, which
has procured for the Priestly Code the title of the "mainstock,"
shows that it presents us with a more developed form of the myths;
while the Jehovist, just because of the defective connection
(in form) of his "fragments," which long caused him to be regarded
as a mere filler-up of the fundamental work, must be judged to stand
nearer to the fountain.
VIII.II.
VIII.II.1. In the history of the patriarchs also, the outlines of
the narrative are the same in Q and in JE. We find in both Abraham's
immigration into Canaan with Sarah and Lot, his separation from
Lot, the birth of Ishmael by Hagar, the appearance of God for the
promise of Isaac, Isaac's birth, the death of Sarah and Abraham,
Ishmael, Isaac's marriage with Rebecca, Jacob and Esau, Jacob's
journey to Mesopotamia and the foundation of his family there, his
return, Esau, Joseph in Egypt, Jacob in Egypt, Jacob's blessing on
Joseph and his other sons, his death and burial. The materials here
are not mythical but national, and therefore more transparent, and in
a certain sense more historical. It is true, we attain to no
historical knowledge of the patriarchs, but only of the time when the
stories about them arose in the Israelite people; this later age is
here unconsciously projected, in its inner and its outward features,
into hoar antiquity, and is reflected there like a glorified mirage.
The skeleton of the patriarchal history consists, it is well known,
of ethnographic genealogy. The Leah-tribes are connected with the
Rachel-tribes under the common father Jacob-Israel: then entire
Israel is connected with the people of Edom under the old name of
Isaac (Amos vii 9, 16). Isaac again is connected under Abraham
with Lot, the father of Moab and Ammon. All these nearly related
and once closely allied Hebrew tribes are shown to be intimately
connected with the inhabitants of the Mesopotamian desert, and
sharply marked off from the Canaanites, in whose land they
dwelt. The narrative speaks of its characters as succeeding each
other in time or contemporary; in this form it indicates logical
or statistical subordination and co-ordination. As a fact the
elements are generally older than the groups and the smaller
groups than the greater. The migrations which are mentioned of
peoples and tribes are necessary consequences of the assumed
relationship. It would be quite possible to present the
composition and relative position of any given people at a given
time in a similar way in the form of a genealogical early
history. True genealogy can scarcely represent precisely the
existing relations. It cannot always be determined as a matter
of fact whether a tribe is the cousin or the brother or the
twin-brother of another tribe, or whether there is any affinity
at all between the two; the affinity can be understood and
interpreted in different ways, the grouping always depends to some
extent on the point of view of the genealogist, or even on his
likings and antipathies. The reason why the Arameans are made so
nearly related to the Israelites is probably that the
patriarchal legend arose in Middle and North Israel; as indeed
the pronounced preference shown for Rachel and Joseph clearly
proves to have been the case. Did the legend belong originally
to Judah, it is likely that more prominence would be given to the
Cainite (Kenite) tribes of the peninsula of Sinai, which, as it
is, are too much thrust into the background; for there can be no
doubt that in the earliest history of Israel these tribes were of
no small importance. Nor are apparent contradictions wanting in
the ethnographic genealogy. Ishmael, Edom, and the Cainite tribes
first mentioned, come into mutual contact in different ways, which
may be quite naturally explained from different views and arrangements
of their mutual relationships. And lastly we may add that the
genealogical form lends itself to the reception of every sort of
materials. In the patriarchal legend, however, the ethnographic
element is always predominant. Abraham alone is certainly not
the name of a people like Isaac and Lot: he is somewhat difficult
to interpret. That is not to say that in such a connection as this
we may regard him as a historical person; he might with more
likelihood be regarded as a free creation of unconscious art. He is
perhaps the youngest figure in the company, and it was probably at
a comparatively late period that he was put before his son Isaac. /1/
******************************************
1. The stories about Abraham and those about Isaac are so similar,
that they cannot possibly be held to be independent of each
other. The stories about Isaac, however, are more original, as
may be seen in a striking way on comparing Genesis xx. 2-16 with
xxvi 6-12. The short nnd profane version, of which Isaac is the
hero, is more lively and pointed; the long and edifying version
in which Abraham replaces Isaac, makes the danger not possible but
actual, thus necessitating the intervention of the Deity and so
bringing about a glorification of the patriarch, which he little
deserved. All the commentators on Genesis indeed, regard chapter
xx. as the original of xxvi.; they do not base their judgment,
however, on a comparison of the parallel passages, but merely
consider that as the father is older than the son, the story
about the father is older than the corresponding story about the
son; and they regard Isaac generally as a mere echo of Abraham.
The obviousness of this principle is too great, and against it we
have to consider that the later development of the legend shows a
manifest tendency to make Abraham the patriarch par excellence and
cast the others into the shade. In the earlier literature, on the
other hand, Isaac is mentioned even by Amos, Abraham first appears
in Isaiah xl.-lxvii. Micah vii 20 belongs to the exile, and the
words "who redeemed Abraham" in Isaiah xxix. 22 are not genuine;
they have no possible position in the sentence, and the idea of
the salvation of Abraham (from the fire of the Chaldaeans) is of
late occurrence. I certainly do not mean to maintain that
Abraham was not yet known when Amos wrote; but he scarcely stood
by this time at the same stage as Isaac and Jacob. As a saint of
Hebron he might he of Calibite ordain, and have something to do
with Ram (1Chronicles ii.). Abram may stand for Abiram, as Abner
for Abiner and Ahab for Ahiab. The name Abu Ruham occurs in the
Hadith as _nomen proprium viri_.
*************************************
In the Jehovist this skeleton of ethnographic genealogy is found
covered throughout with flesh and blood. The patriarchs, Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, are not mere names, but living forms, ideal
prototypes of the true Israelite. They are all peace-loving
shepherds, inclined to live quietly beside their tents, anxious
to steer clear of strife and clamour, in no circumstances prepared
to meet force with force and oppose injustice with the sword.
Brave and manly they are not, but they are good fathers of
families, a little under the dominion of their wives, who are
endowed with more temper. They serve Jehovah in essentially the
same way as their descendants in historical times; religion with
them does not consist of sacrifice alone, but also of an upright
conversation and trustful resignation to God's providence. Jacob
is sketched with a more realistic touch than the other two; he has
a strong dash of artifice and desire of gain, qualities which do
not fail to secure the ends he aims at. He escapes from every
difficulty and danger, not only safely but with profit: Jehovah
helps him, but above all he helps himself, without showing, as
we should judge, any great scruple in his choice of means. The
stories about him do not pretend to be moral, the feeling they
betray is in fact that of undissembled joy in all the successful
artifices and tricks of the patriarchal rogue. Of the subordinate
figures Esau is drawn with some liking for him, then Laban, and
the weak-kneed saint, Lot. Ishmael is drawn as the prototype of
the Bedouin, as a wild ass of a man, whose hand is against every
man, and every man's hand against him.
It is remarkable that the heroes of Israelite legend show so little
taste for war, and in this point they seem to be scarcely a true
reflection of the character of the Israelites as known from their
history. Yet it is not difficult to understand that a people
which found itself incessantly driven into war, not only dreamed
of an eternal peace in the future, but also embodied the wishes of
its heart in these peaceful forms of the golden age in the past.
We have also to consider that the peaceful shepherd life of the
patriarchs is necessary to the idyllic form in which the early
history of the people is cast; only peoples or tribes can make
war, not single men. /1/ This also must serve to explain why
*******************************************
1. This consideration is certainly less decisive than the
foregoing one. Jacob is a peaceful shepherd, not only because
of the idyllic form of the narrative, but in his own being and
character. He forms the strongest contrast to his brother Esau,
who in spite of the idyllic form is a man of war.
Such exceptions as Genesis xiv. and xlviii.'22 (chapter xxxiv.)
only prove the rule.
*******************************************
the historical self-consciousness of the nation finds so little
expression in the personal character of the patriarchs. It makes
vent for itself only in the inserted prophecies of the future;
in these we trace that national pride which was the fruit of the
exploits of David, yet always in a glorified form, rising to
religious exaltation.
In the traits of personal character ascribed to the patriarchs they
represent substantially the nature and the aspirations of the
individual Israelite. The historic-political relations of Israel
are reflected with more life in the relations borne by the patriarchs
to their brothers; cousins, and other relatives. The background is
never long concealed here, the temper of the period of the kings
is everywhere discernible. This is the case most clearly perhaps
in the story about Jacob and Esau. The twins are at variance, even
in the womb; even in the matter of his birth the younger refuses
precedence to the elder, and tries to hold him back by the heel.
This is interpreted to the anxious mother by the oracle at
Beersheba as follows: "Two nations are in thy womb, and two
peoples are separated from thy bowels, and the one people shall
be stronger than the other, and the elder shall serve the
younger." The boys grow up very different. Esau is a rough and
sunburnt hunter, ranges about in the desert, and lives from day to
day without care: Jacob, a pious, smooth man, stays at home
beside the tents, and understands the value of things which his
unsophisticated brother disregards. The former is the favourite
of his father, the autochthonous Isaac, the latter is preferred by
the mother, the Aramaean Rebecca; the former stays in his own
land and takes his wives from the original population of south
Canaan and the Sinaitic peninsula, the latter emigrates, and
brings his wives from Mesopotamia. Thus the contrast is distinctly
prefigured, which at a later time appeared, between the rough Edom,
sprung from the soil and having his roots in it, and smoother,
more civilised Israel, which had more affinity with the great
powers of the world. By means of deceit and trickery the
younger brother succeeds in depriving the elder of the paternal
blessing and of the right of the first-born; the elder, in
consequence of this, determines to kill him, and the situation
becomes strained. Edom was a people and a kingdom before Israel,
but was then overshadowed by Israel, and even subjugated at last
by David: hence the fierce hatred between the brother nations, of
which Amos speaks. The words of the blessing of Jacob show this
quite distinctly to be the historical basis of the legend, a
basis of which the Jews were perfectly conscious: we hear in the
blessing of repeated attempts of the Edomites to cast off the yoke
of Israel, and it is predicted that these efforts will be at last
successful. Thus the stories about Jacob and Esau cannot have
taken form even in outline, before the time of David; in their
present form (Genesis xxvii. 40) their outlook extends to times
still later. The roots of the legend being thus traceable in
later history, a circumstance which the Jehovist does not attempt
to conceal, it is no more than an apparent anachronism when he
takes occasion to give a complete list of the Edomite kings
down to David, interspersing it with historical notes, as, for
example, that Hadad ben Bedad (possibly a contemporary of
Gideon) defeated the Midianites on the plains of Moab. In the
story of Jacob and Laban, again, the contemporary background
shines through the patriarchal history very distinctly. The
Hebrew, on his half-migration, half-flight from Mesopotamia to the
land of Jordan, is hotly pursued by his Aramean father-in-law,
who overtakes him at Gilead. There they treat with each other
and pile up a heap of stones, which is to be the boundary between
them, and which they mutually pledge themselves not to overstep
with hostile intentions. This answers to the actual state of the
facts. The Hebrew migration into Canaan was followed by the
Aramaean, which threatened to overwhelm it. Gilead was the
boundary between the two peoples, and the arena, during a long
period, of fierce conflicts which they waged with each other.
The blessing of Jacob, in the oracle on Joseph, also mentions the
Syrian wars: the archers who press Joseph hard, but are not able
to overcome him, can be no other than the Arameans of Damascus, to
whose attacks he was exposed for a whole century. Joseph here
appears always as the pillar of the North-Israelite monarchy, the
wearer of the crown among his brethren, a position for which he
was marked out by his early dreams. The story of Joseph,
however, in so far as historical elements can be traced in it at
all, and not merely the free work of poetry, is based on much
earlier events, from a time when the union was just being
accomplished of the two sections which together became the people
of Israel. The trait of his brother's jealousy of him points
perhaps to later events. /1/
******************************************
1. It deserves to be considered that at first Joseph is in Egypt
alone, and that his brothers came after, at his request. When the
notion of united Israel was transferred to the distant past, one
consequence was that the fortunes of the part could not be
separated from those of the whole. In the same way, Rachel being
an Aramaean, Leah must be one too. Perhaps the combination of
Rachel and Leah in a national unity was only accomplished by
Moses. Moses came from the peninsula of Sinai (Leah) to lead the
Israelites there from Goshen (Joseph). The designation of Levite
he could not receive in Joseph, only in Leah.
*******************************************
The historical associations which form the groundwork of the
stories of the other sons of Jacob are also comparatively old.
They afford us almost the only information we possess about the
great change which must have taken place in the league of the
tribes soon after Moses. This change principally affected the
group of the four old Leah tribes which were closely connected
with each other. Reuben assumes the rights of his father
prematurely and loses the leadership. Simeon and Levi make,
apart from the others, a faithless attack on the Canaanites,
and collective Israel lets them suffer the consequences alone,
so that they succumb to the vengeance of their enemies and cease
to be tribes. Hence the primogeniture is transferred to Judah.
Judah also suffers great losses, no doubt in the conflict which
accompanied the settlement in the land of Canaan, and is reduced
to a fraction of his former importance. But this breach is made
good by fresh accessions from the mother-stock of the Leah tribes,
by the union of Pharez and Zarah, i.e. of Caleb, Kenaz, Cain (Ken),
Jerahmeel, with the remnant of ancient Judah. The Jehovist
narratives about Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, are undoubtedly
based on occurrences connected with the period of the conquest of
the holy land; but this is not the place to trace the historical
interpretation of the stories further. /1/
****************************************
1. See "Israel," sec. 2, infra. Genesis iv. 1-15 is a similar
tribal history. The old tribe of Cain, the name of which is
indicative of settlement and culture, appears to have been broken
up and scattered to the four winds in very early times (Judges v.
24) in the same way as Levi, with which it appears to have
divided the priesthood. We have already said that Genesis iv. 1-l5
can only have found its way into the primitive legend by
interpolation.
****************************************
It may, however, be remarked, and it is important to
do so, that even where true historic motives are indisputably
present in the patriarchal legend, it is not exactly a
reproduction of the facts as they occurred. In reality Edom
always kept up his hatred against Israel and suppressed his feeling
of relationship (Amos i. 11); in Genesis he meets his brother
returning from Mesopotamia, and trembling with anxiety at the
encounter, in a conciliatory temper which is quite affecting.
The touch is one to reflect no small honour on the ancient
Israelite. To set against this we have the touch, manifestly
inspired by hatred, of Genesis xix. 30-38. No one can fail to
wonder why the daughters of Lot are nameless, but this shows that
they are inserted between Lot and his sons Moab and Ammon purely
for the sake of the incest. Sympathies and antipathies are
everywhere at work, and the standpoint is throughout that of
Northern Israel, as appears most evidently from the circumstance
that Rachel is the fair and the beloved wife of Jacob, whom alone
in fact he wished to marry, and Leah the ugly and despised one who
was imposed on him by a trick. /2. On the whole, the rivalries
***************************************
2 This, however, only warrants us to conclude that these legends
first arose in Ephraim, not that they were written down there in
the form in which we have them.
***************************************
which really existed are rather softened than exaggerated in this
poetical illustration of them; what tends to unity is more prominent
and is more carefully treated than what tends to separation. There
is no trace of any side glances at persons and events of the day, as,
e.g., at the unseemly occurrences at the court of David, and as
little of any twisting or otherwise doctoring the materials to
make them advance this or that tendency.
But these stories would be without point were it not for other
elements which enter into them and attach them to this and that
particular locality. In this aspect we have first of all to
consider that the patriarchs are regarded as the founders of the
popular worship at Shechem, Bethel, Beersheba, and Hebron, as we
saw above, . A whole series
of stories about them are cultus-myths; in these they discover
by means of a theophany that a certain spot of earth is holy ground;
there they erect an altar, and give it the name of the place.
They dwell exclusively at places which were afterwards regarded as
primeval sanctuaries and inaugurate the sacrifices which are offered
there. The significance of these stories is entirely bound up with
the locality; they possess an interest only for those who still
sacrifice to Jehovah on the same altar as Abraham once did, under
the same sacred oak of Moreh or Mamre. In the same way the
patriarchs discover or excavate the caves, or springs, or wells,
and plant the trees, which their posterity still count sacred or
at least honourable, after the lapse of thousands of years. In
some cases also striking or significant formations of the earth's
surface receive a legendary explanation from the patriarchal age.
Were the Dead Sea not there, Sodom and Gomorrha would not have
perished; were there not a small flat tongue of land projecting
into the marsh from the south-east, Lot would have directed his
flight straight to the mountains of his sons Moab and Ammon, and
would not have made the detour by Zoar, which only serves to
explain why this corner was not included in the ruin to the area
of which it properly belongs. The pillar of salt into which Lot's
wife was turned was still pointed out in the days of Josephus;
perhaps the smoke of the furnace which Abraham saw from the
Jewish shore the morning after the catastrophe has some connection
with the town of the same name which was situated there. /1/
******************************************
1 Joshua HNB#N xv. 62 is no doubt more correctly HKB#N: the
name, having the article prefixed to it, must be susceptible of a
clear meaning.
*****************************************
The origin of Mount Gilead is explained from its historical
significance: it is an immense mound which was once heaped up by
Laban and Jacob in order to serve as a boundary between Aram and
Israel. In many instances the names of places gave rise to a
legend which does not always hit upon the true reason of the name.
The spring of Lahai Roi, for example, is an instance of this. The
discovery of this spring saved Hagar and Ishmael from dying of
thirst. Hagar called the name of Jehovah who spoke with her, El
Roi (God of Seeing), for she said, "Have I seen God, and am I
kept in life after my seeing?" Wherefore the well is called
Beer Lahai Roi (he lives who sees me); it is between Kadesh and
Berdan. According to Judges xv. 18-20, 2Samuel xxiii. 11, a
more correct interpretation of Lahai Roi would be " jawbone of the
antelope "--this being the appearance presented by a series of
rocky teeth standing close together there. /1/
************************************
1 Compare Onugnathos and the camel's jawbone in Vakidi, op. cit.
p. 298, note 2: Jakut iv. 353, 9 seq. R)Y is an obsolete name
of an animal. For HLM, Genesis xvi. 15, we should read )LHYM (cf.
1Samuel iii. 13), and before )XRY we should probably insert
W)XY.
************************************
The original motive of the legend, however, as we have now
indicated it, appears in the Jehovist always and everywhere
covered over with the many-coloured robe of fancy. The longer a
story was spread by oral tradition among the people, the more
was its root concealed by the shoots springing from it. For
example, we may assume with regard to the story of Joseph that,
just because it has almost grown into a romance, its origin
stretches back to a remote antiquity. The popular fancy plays as
it will; yet it does not make such leaps as to make it impossible
to trace its course. Miracles, angels, theophanies, dreams, are
never absent from the palette. When Rachel eats the mandrakes
which Reuben had found, and which Leah had given up to her, and
they remove her barrenness so that she becomes the mother of
Joseph, we have a story based on a vulgar superstition. Purely
mythical elements are found isolated in the story of Jacob's
wrestling with the Deity at the ford of the Jabbok. Etymology
and proverbs are a favourite motive, and often give rise to lively
and diversified tales. Even in pieces which we should be inclined
to attribute to the art of individuals, old and characteristic
themes may be involved. The story of Jacob and Laban, for
example, is entirely composed of such materials. The courtship at
the well is twice repeated with no great variation. The trait of
the father-in-law's wish to get his oldest daughter first off his
hands and craftily bringing her to the son-in-law after the
wedding-feast, is scarcely due to the invention of an individual.
The shepherd's tricks, by which Jacob colours the sheep as he likes,
have quite the flavour of a popular jest. The observance of
hospitality or transgressions against it, occupy a prominent place
in the Genesis of the Jehovist; Lot's entertainment, and the
Sodomites' insulting maltreatment, of the Deity who comes among
them in disguise, is an incident that appears in the legends of
many races. There is little psychological embellishment, little
actual making-up; for the most part we have the product of a
countless number of narrators, unconsciously modifying each
other's work. How plastic and living the materials must have
been even in the ninth and eighth century, we see from the
manifold variants and repetitions of the same stories, which,
however, scarcely change the essential character of the themes.
One more trait must be added to the character of the Jehovist.
Each of his narratives may be understood by itself apart from
the rest; the genealogy serves merely to string them together;
their interest and significance is not derived from the connection
in which they stand. Many of them have a local colour which
bespeaks a local origin; and how many of them are in substance
inconsistent with each other, and stand side by side only by
compulsion! The whole literary character and loose connection of
the Jehovist story of the patriarchs reveals how gradually its
different elements were brought together, and how little they
have coalesced to a unity. In this point the patriarchal history
of the Jehovist, stands quite on the same footing with his legend
of the origins of the human race, the nature of which we have
already demonstrated.
VIII.II.2. It is from the Jehovistic form of the legends that we
derive our picture of the patriarchs, that picture which children
learn at school and which they find it easy to retain. To compare
the parallel of the Priestly Code it is necessary to restore it as
a whole, for few are aware of the impression it produces.
"And Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed out of
Haran. And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son,
and all their substance that they had gathered, and the souls
that they had gotten in Haran, and they went forth to go into
the land of Canaan, and into the land of Canaan they came (xii.
4b, 5). And the land was not able to bear them that they might
dwell together, for their substance was great so that they could
not dwell together. And they separated themselves the one from
the other; Abram dwelled in the land of Canaan, and Lot dwelled
in the cities of the Kikkar. /1/
*******************************************
1. Where the Dead Sea was afterwards.
******************************************
And it came to pass when God destroyed the cities of the
Kikkar, that God remembered Abram, and sent Lot out of the midst
of the overthrow-, when he overthrew the cities in which Lot dwelt...
(xiii. 6, 11b, 12ab, xix. 29). And Sarai was barren: she had
no child. And Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her
maid, after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan, and
gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife. And Hagar bare Abram
a son; and Abram called his son's name which Hagar bare, Ishmael.
And Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bare Ishmael to
Abram" (xi. 30, xvi. 3, 15, 16)
Then follows the covenant of God with Abram, whose name he now
changes to Abraham, and the institution of circumcision as the
mark of those who belong to the covenant; then the announcement
of the birth of Isaac by Sarai, now ninety years old, who is
henceforth to be called Sarah, and Isaac's nomination as heir
of the covenant in place of Ishmael (chapter xvii.).
"And Sarah bore Abraham a son at the set time of which God had
spoken to him. And Abraham called the name of his son that was
born unto him, whom Sarah bare to him, Isaac. And Abraham
circumcised his son Isaac, after eight days, as God had commanded
him. And Abraham was an hundred years old when Isaac his
son was born unto him (xxi. 2-5). And the life of Sarah was an
hundred and twenty seven years; these were the years of the life
of Sarah. And Sarah died in Kirjath-Arba, the same is Hebron in
the land of Canaan" (xxiii. 1, 2).
Then comes the treaty of Abraham, reported with all due legal
accuracy, with Ephron the Hittite, from whom he purchases the
cave of Machpelah, which is over against Mamre, for a family
burying-place (xxiii.).
"And these are the days of the years of Abraham's life which he
lived, a hundred and seventy five years. And Abraham gave up the
ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years;
and was gathered to his fellow tribesmen. And his sons Isaac and
Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron
ben Zohar the Hittite, which is before Mamre; the field which Abraham
purchased of the sons of Heth; there was Abraham buried and Sarah
his wife. And after Abraham was dead, God blessed his son Isaac"
(xxv. 7-11a).
Next come the Toledoth (generations) of Ishmael according to the
regular practice of first exhausting the collaterals (xxv. 12-17).
"These are the Toledoth of Isaac the son of Abraham. Abraham begat
Isaac...and Isaac was 40 years old when he took Rebecca to wife, the
daughter of Bethuel the Syrian of Padan Aram, the sister to Laban
the Syrian....And Isaac was 60 years old when Esau and Jacob
were born (xxv. 19, 20, 26c). And Esau was 40 years old when he
took to wife Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and
Bashemath, the daughter of Elon the Hittite, and they were a
grief of mind unto Isaac and to Rebekah. And Rebekah said to
Isaac, I am weary of my life because of the daughters of Heth;
if Jacob also take such wives of the daughters of Heth, of the
daughters of the land, what good shall my life do to me? Then
Isaac called Jacob and blessed him and charged him, saying, Thou
shalt not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan; arise, go to
Padan-Aram to the house of Bethuel thy mother's father, and take
thee a wife from thence of the daughters of Laban thy mother's
brother. And El Shaddai will bless thee, and make thee fruitful
and multiply thee, and give thee the blessing of Abraham, to thee
and to thy seed with thee, that thou mayest inherit the land
wherein thou art a stranger, which God gave unto Abraham. And
Isaac sent away Jacob, and he went to Padan-Aram unto Laban ben
Bethuel, the Syrian, the brother of Rebecca, Jacob and Esau's
mother. And Esau saw that Isaac blessed Jacob, and sent him to
Padan-Aram to take him a wife from thence, and that as he blessed
him, he gave him a charge, saying, Thou shalt not take a wife of
the daughters of Canaan. Now Jacob hearkened to his father, and
went to Padan-Aram. But Esau saw that the daughters of Canaan
pleased not Isaac his father; then went Esau unto Ishmael, and
took unto the wives which he had Mahalath the sister of Nebaioth
to be his wife (xxvi. 34 seq., xxvii. 46, xxviii. 1-9). And
Laban gave unto his daughter Leah Zilpah his maid for her
handmaid. And he gave him Rachel his daughter to wife. And Laban
gave to Rachel his daughter Bilhah his handmaid to be her maid
(xxix.24, 28b, 29). And the sons of Jacob were twelve. The sons
of Leah: Reuben, Jacob's firstborn, Simeon, Judah, Issachar,
Zebulun. The sons of Rachel: Joseph and Benjamin. The sons of
Bilhah, Rachel's handmaid: Dan and Naphtali. The sons of Zilpah,
Leah's handmaid: Gad and Asher; these are the sons of Jacob,
which were born to him in Padan-Aram (xxxv. 23-26)....[and Jacob
took] all his goods which he had gotten, the gear of his property
which he had gotten in Padan-Aram, to go home to Isaac his father
in the land of Canaan (xxx). 18). And God appeared unto Jacob
when he was coming home from Padan-Aram, and blessed him; and God
said unto him, Thy name is Jacob; thy name shall not be called any
more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name. And God said unto him;
I am El Shaddai; be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company
of nations shall be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins;
and the land which I gave Abraham and Isaac, to thee will I give it,
and to thy seed after thee will I give the land. And God went up
from him in the place where He talked with him. And Jacob called
the name of the place where God spake with him Bethel (xxxv. 9-13,
15). And they departed from Bethel; and when there was but a little
way to come unto Ephrath, Rachel died, and was buried there in the
way to Ephrath; the same is Bethlehem (xxxv. 16a, 19, cf. xlviii.
7, xlix. 3I). And Jacob came unto Isaac his father unto Mamre,
unto Kirjath-Arba, which is Hebron, where Abraham and Isaac dwelt
as strangers. And the days of Isaac were a hundred and eighty
years. And Isaac gave up the ghost, and died, and was gathered
unto his people, being old and full of days; and his sons Esau
and Jacob buried him" (xxxv. 27-29.) Then follow the generations
of Esau in chapter xxxvi. /1/
***********************************
1. Only part of this chapter, however, belongs to the Priestly
Code.
***********************************
"And Esau took his wives, and his sons, and his daughters, and all
the souls of his house, and his cattle, and all his beasts, and all
his substance, which he had got in the land of Canaan, and went
into the land of Seir from the face of his brother Jacob. For their
riches were more than that they might dwell together, and the land
of their sojourn could not bear them because of their cattle. And
Esau dwelt in Mount Seir; Esau is Edom. And Jacob dwelt in the land
of the sojourn of his father, in the land of Canaan (xxxvi. 6-8,
xxxvii. 1).
These are the Toledoth of Jacob...(xxxxvii. 2). And they took their
cattle, and their goods, which they had gotten in the land of Canaan,
and came into Egypt, Jacob and all his seed with him, his sons,
and his sons' sons, and all his seed, brought he with him
into Egypt" (xlvi. 6, 7).
Then follows the enumeration of the seventy souls of which his seed
was then composed.
"And Jacob and his sons came to Egypt to Joseph; and Pharaoh the king
of Egypt heard it. And Pharaoh said to Jacob, How many are the days
of the years of thy life? And Jacob said to Pharaoh, The days
of the years of my sojourning are a hundred and thirty years; few and
evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained
unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers, in the days of
their sojourning. And Joseph placed his father and his brethren,
and gave them a possession in the land of Egypt, in the best part of
the land, in the land of Rameses, as Pharaoh had commanded (xlvii.
5b, 6, LXX, xlvii. 7-11). And they settled there, and grew and
multiplied exceedingly. And Jacob lived in the land of Egypt
seventeen years, and the whole age of Jacob was 7 years and 140
years (xlvii. 27b, 28)....And Jacob said unto Joseph, El Shaddai
appeared unto me at Luz, in the land of Canaan, and blessed me,
and said unto me, Behold, I will make thee fruitful and multiply
thee, and I will make of thee a multitude of peoples; and will give
this land to thy seed after thee for an everlasting possession.
And now thy two sons which were born unto thee in Egypt, before I
came unto thee in Egypt, are mine; Ephraim and Manasseh shall be
mine, as Reuben and Simeon. And the issue which thou begettest
after them shall be thine, and shall be called after the name of
their brethren in their inheritance. And when I came from Padan,
Rachel died to me in the land of Canaan, in the way, when there
was but a little way to come into Ephrath, and I buried her
there, in the way to Ephrath; the same is Bethlehem (xlviii.
3-7, and v. 7, cf. xlix. 31)...[and his other sons also] he
blessed; and he charged them, and said unto them, I am to be
gathered unto my people, bury me with my fathers in the cave of
the field of Machpelah, which is before Mamre, in the land of
Canaan, which field Abraham bought from Ephron the Hittite, for a
hereditary burying-place-there they buried Abraham and Sarah his
wife, there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife, and there I
buried Leah--the possession of the field and of the cave that is
therein from the children of Heth. And Jacob made an end of
commanding his sons, and he gathered up his feet into the bed,
and yielded up the ghost, and was gathered unto his fellow-tribesmen
(xlix. 28b-33). And his sons carried him into the land of Canaan,
and buried him in the cave of the field of Machpelah, which Abraham
had bought for a hereditary burying-place from Ephron the Hittite,
over against Mamre (l. 12, 13). And these are the names of the
children of Israel which came into Egypt, with Jacob they came,
every one with his house; Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar,
Zebulon, Benjamin, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher. And all the souls
that came out of Jacob's loins were seventy souls; and Joseph was
in Egypt. And the children of Israel were fruitful and increased
abundantly, and the land was filled with them, and the Egyptians
made the children of Israel their servants with rigour, in all
their work which they wrought by them with rigour, and they
made their lives bitter with hard bondage (Exodus i. 1-7, 13,
14). And the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage;
and they cried, and their cry because of the bondage came up
unto God, and God heard their groaning, and God remembered His
covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob, and God took
notice (ii. 23-25). And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him,
I am Jehovah. I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob
by the name of El Shaddai; but by my name Jehovah was I not
known unto them; and I made a covenant with them to give them the
land of Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage, wherein they were
strangers. And I have heard the groaning of the children of
Israel, that the Egyptians keep them in bondage, and I have
remembered my covenant" (vi. 2 seq.).
That is the whole of it. As a rule nothing more is aimed at than
to give the mere links and articulations of the narrative. It is
as if Q were the scarlet thread on which the pearls of JE are
hung. In place of the somewhat loose connections of the Jehovist,
the narrative of the Priestly Code shows a firmly jointed
literary form; one remarkable feature of which is to be seen in
the regular titles which stand at the head of the various
sections. Each section begins with the words )LH TWLDWT (_hae sunt
generationes_), from which Genesis derives its name. /l/
****************************************
1 *)AUTH (H BIBLOS GENESEWS ii. 4 LXX. Hence Ewald's name for the
Priestly Code, which is very appropriate for Genesis, or perhaps
generally for the book of the four covenants--the Book of Origins.
*****************************************
In the rest of the historical literature of the Old Testament nothing
like this as yet appears. It is also characteristic that whenever
the title occurs, introducing a new, section, the contents of the
preceding section are first of all briefly recapitulated so as to
show the place of the link upon the chain.
The Priestly Code enters as little as possible on the contents of
the various narratives. The predicates are stripped off, so far
as they admit of such treatment, and the subjects duly entered
in a catalogue with connecting text. In this way the history
almost shrinks to the compass of a genealogy with explanations--
the genealogy at least forms the principal contents of the history,
and here appears in such proportions and such systematic fashion
as nowhere else. This has been regarded as a proof that Q belongs
to an older stage of development of Hebrew historiography than JE.
There can be no doubt, it is said, /1/ that the oldest Hebrew,
***************************************
I Riehm, "die s.g. Grundschrift des Pentateuchs" in Studien und
Kritiken, 1872, p. 296.
***************************************
or indeed Oriental, history began with the historical notices
and traditions inserted in the tribal or family catalogues.
Yet we know positively that in the Books of Judges, Samuel,
and Kings, there are no genealogical statistics at all, while
Chronicles, and what belongs to Chronicles, is full of them.
We know also that songs such as those in Josh. x. 12, 13; Jud. v.;
2Samuel i. 19 seq., iii. 33 seq. are the oldest historical
monuments, and that a number of them are found in JE and not
a single one in Q. Herder's theory of the development of history
out of genealogy will not apply here, /2/ but indeed what we have
***********************************
2 Nor in the case of the Arabs, as has been well shown by Sprenger
against Caussin de Perceval (Essai, preface, p. ix.).
***********************************
to do with here is not history proper at all, but folklore.
It is true that with the Jehovist also the genealogy underlies
the narrative as its skeleton. It is the natural chain to link
the different stories together, and even at a time when the
latter were still separate and only circulated orally, the
genealogy was not unknown to the people. When stories were told
of Isaac and Ishmael, and Lot and Esau, every one knew at once
who these personages were, and how they were related to Israel
and to one another. But this was merely the presupposition of
the narratives, known as a matter of course to the hearers;
the interesting element in them consisted in those traits
which the Priestly Code omits. Stories of this kind compel
attention because they set forth the peculiarities of different
peoples as historically and really related to each other, not
according to an empty embryological relation. It is the temper
displayed by different races, not the stem of their relationship,
that makes the point of the stories; their charm and their very
life depend on their being transparent and reflecting the historic
attitude of the time which gave them birth. The clearer the traces
they display of love and hatred, jealousy of rivals and joy in
their fall, the nearer are we to the forces which originated the
tradition about early times. In the Priestly Code all those
stories are absent in which there is anything morally objectionable,--
those for example in which the cowardice of the patriarchs
endangers the honour of their wives, those of Sarah's cruel
jealousy of Hagar, and of the unlovely contention of Leah and
Rachel for husband and children, of the incest of Lot's
daughters, of the violation of Dinah. All hatred, and strife,
and deceit in the patriarchal family disappear: Lot and Abraham,
Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, agree to separate: of the
tricks of Laban and Jacob to each other, of the treachery of
Simeon and Levi to Shechem, of the enmity Joseph's brethren bore
to him, there is not a word in the Priestly Code. It is not
merely that "psychological decorations," as they have been
called, are left out; the very heart of the business has been
cut out. That Moab and Ammon, Ishmael and Edom, were Hebrew
peoples, all more nearly or more distantly related to the
Israelites, that the Aramaeans too were closely connected with
the Hebrews by blood and by marriage, that this tribe lives in
one district contiguous to Palestine, that in another--this is what
the Priestly Code has to tell. Dry ethnographical and
geographical facts like these are presented in a genealogical
form; all we learn of the patriarchs is their marriages and
births and how they separated to the various dwelling-places of
their descendants. And folklore could not possibly be directed
to such facts as these at a period when these relations were all
matters of fact and familiar to every child. The Priestly Code,
moreover, strips the legends of the patriarchs of their local as
well as their historical colour; they are kept at a distance from
all the places of the sacredness of which the Jehovist makes them
the founders. /1/
**********************************************
1. Hupteld gives a curious turn to this, saying that in the
Priestly Code Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have much more permanent
settlements. But it is this work that insists so often on the
fact that the patriarchs were pilgrims and had nowhere a fixed
residence: it only says that Abraham dwelt in the land of Canaan,
and names no particular place even as the scene of the theophany
in chapter xvii. It is only when the question of burying Sarah
and Abraham arises that there is a change. Something must be
done, and the field of Machpelah near Hebron is acquired (no doubt
JE reported this, but the account of it in that source is lost) as
a possession of the patriarchal family, where it now settles more
permanently. That Isaac and Jacob continue to dwell at the grave
of Abraham is a statement of which the significance is negative
rather than positive, and on the other hand the patriarchal
journeys up and down in JE are not designed to represent them as
wandering nomads, but serve to bring them in contact with all the
sacred places with which they had special associations,
***********************************************
No historical geography is needed in order to understand the
narrative of the Priestly Code in Genesis: but that is only to
say that it stands quite away from the soil out of which oral
tradition arises. It deals in no etymology, no proverbs nor
songs, no miracles, theophanies nor dreams, and is destitute of
all that many-coloured poetic charm which adorns the Jehovistic
narratives. But this proves not its original simplicity but its
neglect of the springs from which legend arises, and of its most
essential elements. /1/ What remains is anything but historical
objectivity: it is the formula and nothing more.
********************************************
1. Riehm (op. cit. p. 302 seq.) thinks it is made out that the
religious tradition of remote antiquity is distinguished by its
"modest simplicity", and by a "style suited to its exalted
subject." Only in the course of time was it adorned with all sorts
of miraculous and mysterious elements, and that by the "fancy of
the people," which, however, does not so easily gain entrance
into serious literature(!) He appeals to the fact that the
conception of angels, though certainly long developed with the
people, occurs in the earlier prophets only in isolated instances,
and in the later prophets, as Ezekiel, Zechariah, Daniel, more
frequently. It is difficult to sift out what is true and what is
false in this confused argument. In the Priestly Code there are,
it is true, no angels, but on the other hand we have Azazel and
Seirim (2Chronicles xi. 15; Isaiah xiii. 21, xxxiv. 14, comp.
supra), for where the gods are not, the ghosts have sway.
In one of the two main sources of the Jehovist (J), we find
chiefly the Mal'ak Jahve (message of Jehovah); that is Jehovah
Himself in so far as He appears and manifests Himself, whether in
a natural phenomenon or in human form. Different are the B'ne
Elohim, beings of divine substance: they perhaps are indicated
in the 1st plural in the mouth of Jehovah (Genesis iii. 22, xi. 7).
Both of these are doubtless very old. In the other principal
source (E) a mixture appears to have taken place: the heavenly
hosts are not only the children and companions of Deity, but also
its messengers, conductors of the communication between heaven and
earth (:xviii. 12); here we have the Mal'akim beside God and in
the plural. This view also is not exactly a late one, as we see
from the vision of Micaiah (t Kings xxii. 19). What does Riehm
mean by high antiquity? A period from which no monuments are
preserved to us? Why does he limit his attention to the
prophetic literature? He concedes that the idea of angels was
early present "in the fancy of the people," and he should have
been equal to the further concession that those who wrote down the
FOLKLORE occupied a somewhat different position to POPULAR BELIEF
from that of the prophetic preachers of repentance. Not even the
historical books admit of being measured by the same standard in
this matter as the pre-historic tradition. And which is the more
original--that the angels use a ladder as in Genesis, or that they
have wings as in Isaiah? And finally as for the reference to
Ezekiel (?), Zechariah, and Daniel, the difference appears to me to
be tolerably plain between a systematic angelology which
operates always with numbers and names and the childlike belief in
angels. The former removes God to a distance, the latter brings Him
near.
*************************************************
As with the legend of the beginnings of things, so with the legend
of the patriarchs: what is essential and original is the individual
element in the several stories; the connection is a secondary matter,
and only introduced on the stories being collected and reduced to
writing. But in the Priestly Code the individuality of the several
stories is simply destroyed: to such an extent is the connection
dwelt on. What meaning is there in the statement that Jacob was all
at once called Israel, i.e., Fight-God (xxxv. 10), if no mention is
made of his wrestling with El, which was the occasion of his change
of name? Have we anything like the true history of Joseph in the
Priestly Code? Can we regard it as the original history, when
the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is dismissed in a
subordinate clause, as is done in xix. 29 ? The remarkable
admission has been made, /1/ that it is plain from the summary
*****************************************
1. Riehm, op.. cit. p. 292.
****************************************
manner of reporting of the Priestly Code, that the author could
have told his story at much greater length, had it been
consistent with the plan of his work to do so, and that this
certainly points to sources where greater detail was used. The
more detailed source, however, which is thus taken for granted,
need by no means, it is said, have been a written one, and least
of all the Jehovistic narrative before us; on the contrary, we
are told, the state of the case is best satisfied by the
assumption that the author held a more detailed narrative to be
unnecessary, because the oral tradition, living in the mouth of
the people, was quite able to fill in the colours in his outlines
and to convert his chronistic notices into living pictures. But
this is merely an attempt to elude the necessity for exactly
comparing the Priestly Code and the Jehovist. The question is,
which of the two writings stands nearest to the starting-point?
Is it the one which attaches most importance to elements which are
foreign to the nature of oral tradition altogether and only added
in literary composition? It would be a curious thing if the
writing down of the tradition began with writing down what the
legend did not contain. What is set before us in the Priestly
Code is the quintessence not of the oral tradition, but of the
tradition when already written down. And the written account of
the primitive history which it employs is the Jehovistic
narrative. The order in which the popular legends are there placed
here becomes the very kernel of the narrative. There the plan
was hidden behind the execution, but here it comes forward not
indeed essentially changed, but sharp and accentuated, as the
principal feature of the whole.
VIII.II.3. The Jehovist still lives in the spirit of the legend,
but the Priestly Code is strange to that spirit, and does violence
to the legend, by treating it from its own point of view, which is
quite different from the old one. Moral and religious culture is
further advanced; and hence the removal of real or apparent offences
against morality and of notions which are too childish, or superstitious,
or even mythical. If the Godhead appears, it must not be patent
to the senses, at least it must not be seen in visible form.
Jehovah speaks with Jacob, but not in a dream from the heavenly
ladder; He reveals Himself to Moses, but not in the burning bush;
the notion of revelation is retained, but the subsidiary
incidents which must be added to make a concrete of the abstract,
are stripped off. It is a matter of indifference under what forms
or through what media a man receives revelation, if only the fact
stands sure; in other words, revelation is no longer a living
reality of the present, but a dead dogma for the past. The
progress of culture in the Priestly Code is most of all evident
in the learned historical treatment with which the legend is
overlaid. First of all there is the chronology, which we
encountered even in the legend of the origins of mankind, and
which is naturally continued in the patriarchal legend. Here
indeed we see with special plainness how foreign learned
calculation is to the poetical materials; in some instances the
facts lead to quite a different view from that of the numbers.
Following the numbers of the Priestly Code we may, with the
Rabbis, regard Shem and Eber as the venerable heads of the Jewish
school in which the child Jacob learned his letters and the Torah.
Then Jacob's sojourn in Mesopotamia lasts about eighty years, and
all this time Isaac is Iying on his death-bed; after being long
dead for us, he suddenly appears again, but only to die. And
hand in hand with the chronology there goes the general
predilection of the Priestly Code for numbers and names, which
displays itself even in Genesis, though not nearly so marked
there as in the later books of the Pentateuch. Oral folklore can
very well contain round numbers, such as the twelve sons and the
seventy souls of the family of Jacob, the twelve wells and the
seventy palm trees at Elim, the seventy elders and the twelve
spies; but a chronological system, whole lists of exact and
considerable numbers, bare catalogues of personal names, none of
them having any significance, dates and measurements such as
those in the account of the flood in the Priestly Code, require
writing even to originate, not to speak of transmitting them.
These art-products of pedantry toke the place of the living
poetic detail of the Jehovist narrative; the element of episode
has to give way to the seriousness of dry history.
It is also a mark of historical pedantry that the mixing up of
the period of the patriarchs with a later period is avoided as
anachronistic. In the Jehovist the present everywhere shines
through, he in no way conceals his own age; we are told that
Babylon is the great world-city, that the Assyrian Empire is in
existence, with the cities of Niniveh and Calah and Resen; that
the Canaanites had once dwelt in Palestine, but had long been
absorbed in the Israelites. The writer of the Priestly Code is
very careful not to do anything like this. /1/ He brushes up the
****************************************
1. Hence also archaisms such as Kirjath-Arba, Luz, Ephrath.
Compare the antiquarian lore in Deuteronomy i.-iv. and in
Genesis xiv.
******************************************
legend and makes history of it according to the rules of art; he
kills it as legend, and deprives it of all real value, such as it
possesses, not indeed for the history of primitive times, but for
that of the age of the kings.
The history of the first men and of the patriarchs is divided by
the Priestly Code into three periods, each of them opened by a
covenant. The covenant with Adam (Genesis i. 28-ii. 4) is the
simplest; it is not called a covenant, but it is the basis of the
second covenant with Noah (ix. 1-17), which modifies it in
important particulars, and brings it nearer to the present age.
The covenant with Abraham (Genesis xvii.), which alone is ratified
with the succeeding patriarchs, does not apply to the whole of
mankind, but only to Abraham's seed, and especially to Israel.
The first sign of the covenant is the Sabbath (Genesis ii. 3;
comp. Exodus xxxi. 12 seq.; Ezekiel xx. 12, 20), the second
the rainbow (Genesis ix. 12), the third circumcision (xvii. 10).
The first parent of mankind is enjoined to use a purely vegetable
diet, the father of mankind after the, flood receives permission
to slaughter animals; but he is expressly ordered not to eat
flesh in the blood, and besides, to shed the blood of no man.
What is said to Noah remains good for Abraham; but to the latter
God promises that his posterity by Sarah shall possess the land
of Canaan, and this is further assured by the purchase of the
cave of Machpelah for a family burying-place, the purchase being
executed according to all the forms of law, with prolonged
negotiations. Further, God reveals Himself to Abraham as El
Shaddai, and under this name He also manifests Himself to Isaac
(xxviii. 3) and Jacob (xxxv. 11), repeating to them the promise
of the possession of the land. It is pointed out with emphasis
that God was not known to the pre-Mosaic time under His Israelite
name, that He revealed Himself to the patriarchs only as El
Shaddai, and as Jehovah first to Moses (Exod. vi. 2, 3). With
a similar intention, which is not far to seek, the time of the
patriarchs is kept free of the other Mosaic forms of worship;
hence we have here no sacrifices nor altars, no distinction of
clean and unclean beasts, nor anything of the kind. Now till
within a short time ago, there was a great inclination (no one
will be found at this date to acknowledge that he felt it) to
admire the sobriety and faithfulness of the Priestly Code, as
shown in this observance of the different religious stages.
But in fact we can only admire these advantages in it, if we
believe that the religion was at first naturalistic, that then
all at once it became a good deal more positive, and then quite
positive in the year 1500 B.C. How can we regard it as showing
historical faithfulness, that the patriarchs were allowed to
slaughter, but not to sacrifice, and that first the Sabbath was
introduced, then the rainbow, then circumcision, and at last
sacrifice, under Moses? It is natural that Jacob at Bethel should
give tithes of all that he possesses, unnatural that the eponymous
hero should not in worship above all things have left a good example
to his posterity. What is it but a theory, that the name Jehovah
was first revealed to Moses, and through him to the Israelites,
and that it was quite unknown before?--a theory which certainly
cannot be upheld, for Moses could have done nothing more irrational
than to introduce a new name for the God of their fathers, to whom
he directed his people,--and yet a theory which, from the correlation
between Jehovah the God of Israel and Israel the people of Jehovah,
readily suggests itself, and is not altogether peculiar to the
author of the Priestly Code. /1/. He had a pattern which suggested
****************************************
1. Exodus vi. 2, 3 (Q) = iii. 13, 14 (JE). The burning bush shows
the theophany in the Jehovist to be the earlier. In the Priestly
Code it almost loses the character of a theophany entirely. But
this is also quite clear on a comparison of Exodus vii. 1 (Q) and
iv. 16 (JE). The phrase vii. 1, " Behold, I make thee a god to
Pharaoh, and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet," is a
degradation of the corresponding passage, iv. 16 "Aaron shall be
to thee for a mouth, and thou shalt be to him for a god." For if
Aaron is the prophet or the mouth of Moses, then in the original
and only appropriate way of thinking of the matter, Moses is a
god for Aaron, not for Pharaoh. By the way is there anything in
the similarity between Sene and Sinai?
******************************************
certain lines, and these he traces strongly and with a system;
and he even goes so far as to avoid the name of Jehovah even in
his own narrative of the pre-Mosaic period. Even when speaking
in his own person, he says Elohim, not Jehovah, down to Exodus vi.
The three periods and the three corresponding covenants of the
early age are preliminaries to the fourth period and the fourth
covenant. The narrator everywhere has an eye to the Mosaic law,
and the thought of it determined the plan which comes so prominently
into view in his representation of the origins of human history.
The great features of this plan are the great official transactions
of Jehovah with the patriarchs. In these we have not a narrative
but only speeches and negotiations; the preliminary laws are given
in them, which, as they advance step by step, prepare the way
for the great Law, namely, the Mosaic. The law of worship has
taken the place of the legend of worship. In the legend the
sacred usages and customs arise, as it were, spontaneously, in
connection with any occasion, placed in the early sacred time,
which may serve to account for them. Jehovah does not make it
statutory that the sinew of the thigh may not be eaten; but He
wrestles with Israel, and injures the sinew of his thigh during
the wrestling, and for this reason the children of Israel do not
eat thereof. In the following story it is explained how it came
about that the Israelites circumcise young boys (Exodus iv. 25
seq.). As Moses was returning from Midian to Goshen, he spent a
night on the road, and Jehovah fell upon him with the intention of
killing him. His wife, Zipporah, however, took a flint and cut
off the foreskin of her son, and touched Moses L:RAGLFYW with it,
saying, Thou art a blood-bridegroom to me. Then Jehovah let him
go. Thus Zipporah circumcises her son instead of her husband,
makes the latter symbolically a blood-bridegroom, and thereby
delivers him from the wrath of Jehovah to which he is exposed,
because he is not a blood-bridegroom, ie., because he has not
submitted to circumcision before his marriage. In other words,
the circumcision of male infants is here explained as a milder
substitute for the original circumcision of young men before
marriage. /1/ Compare with this the style in which in Genesis xvii
************************************************
1. That this is in fact the original custom is clear from the word
XTN, which signifies both circumcision and bridegroom (or in
Arabic, son-in-law). This explains the meaning of XTN DMYM in
Exodus iv. 25. The original usage is still in force with some
Arab tribes. In Genesis xxxiv. Shechem has to submit to
circumcision before marriage.
***************************************************
the Priestly Code institutes the circumcision of male children on
the eighth day after birth. This institution completely throws
into the shade and spoils the story out of which it arose, namely,
the promise of the birth of Isaac as a reward to Abraham of the
hospitality he showed Jehovah at Hebron. But there is more than
a difference in form, there is a material contradiction between
the Jehovistic legend and the priestly law. The law purifies the
legend, that is to say, denies all its main features and motives.
As we saw in the first chapter there is a conscious polemic at work
in the representation in the Priestly Code that Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob erect no altars, and practice no religious rites, and
that they have no connection with the sacred places with which
in JE they are inseparably associated. The popular religious
book preserved to us in the Jehovistic Genesis, not corrected
to any great extent, though certainly to some extent, tells how
the ancestors and representatives of Israel founded the old popular
worship at the principal sites at which it was kept up. The law
of the legitimate cultus of Jerusalem, as it lies before us in the
Priestly Code, reforms and destroys the old popular worship on
the basis of Mosaic, i.e., prophetical ideas. The tabernacle
does not harmonize with the sanctuaries of Hebron, Beersheba,
Shechem, Kadesh, Mahanaim, Lahai-Roi, Bethel; the patriarchs live
at Hebron only because they are to be buried there, not to
entertain the Deity under the oak of Mamre and to build an altar
there. The heretical mac,c,ebas, trees and wells, disappear, and
with them the objectionable customs: that God should have
summoned Abraham to offer up to Him his only son is an idea the
Priestly Code could not possibly entertain. The whole material
of the legend is subordinated to legislative designs: the
modifying influence of the law on the narrative is everywhere
apparent.
The attitude of Judaism to the old legend is on the whole negative,
but it added some new elements. While the patriarchs are not
allowed to sacrifice, only to slaughter, they have, on the other
hand, the Sabbath /1/ and circumcision. In this they are like
****************************************
I The Sabbath is not a Mosaic institution according to the Priestly
Code. But it is presupposed in Exodus xvi., and according to Genesis
ii. 3, it was in force from the beginning of the world. With the
old Israelites the Sabbath was much less important in relation to
worship than the festivals: in Judaism the opposite was the case.
*****************************************
the Jews in Babylon, who were deprived of the national cultus, and
replaced it with these two symbols of religious membership and
union, which were independent of the temple of Jerusalem. In the
exile, after the cessation of the service of the altar, the Sabbath
and circumcision attained that significance as symbols--in the
genuine old meaning of the Greek word--as practical symbols of
Judaism, which they retain to the present day. The emphasis is
noteworthy with which the Priestly Code always insists on the
fact that the patriarchs sojourned in a strange land, that they
were _Gerim_. If we also consider that Abraham is said to have
migrated into Palestine from Ur, from Chaldaea, it is hardly possible
to reject the idea that the circumstances of the exile had some
influence in moulding the priestly form of the patriarchal
legend. In spite of all the efforts of the historian, and all the
archaic appearance of his work, it may in that case still be the
fact that the surroundings of the narrator found positive
expression in his description of the patriarchal times.
VIII.III.
In the Jehovistic history-book Genesis is a most
important part, and occupies at least a half of the whole work:
in the Priestly Code, Genesis quite disappears in comparison with
the later books. Only with the Mosaic legislation does this work
arrive at its own ground, and it at once stifles the narrative
under a mass of legislative matter. Here also there is a thin
historical thread running parallel to the Jehovist, but we constantly
lose sight of it from the repeated interruptions made by extensive
ritual laws and statistical statements.
"These last four books of Moses have been made quite unreadable by
a most melancholy, most incomprehensible, revision. The course of
the history is everywhere interrupted by the insertion of
innumerable laws, with regard to the greater part of which it is
impossible to see any reason for their being inserted where they
are." The dislocation of the narrative by these monstrous growths
of legislative matter is not, as Goethe thinks, to be imputed to
the editor; it is the work of the unedited Priestly Code itself,
and is certainly intolerable; nor can it be original; the
literary form of the work at once shows this. It is still
possible to trace how the legal matter forces its way into the
narrative, and once there spreads itself and takes up more and
more room. In the Jehovist, one form of the tradition may still
be discerned, according to which the Israelites on crossing the
Red Sea at once proceeded towards Kadesh, without making the detour
to Sinai. We only get to Sinai in Exodus xix., but in Exodus
xvii. we are already at Massah and Meribah, ie., on the ground
of Kadesh. That is the scene of the story of Moses striking water
out of the rock with his staff: there the fight with the Amalekites
took place--they lived there and not at Sinai--there also the visit
of Jethro, which requires a locality at some distance from his home
(at Sinai), a place where the people had not merely a temporary
encampment, but their permanent seat of justice. /1/
*******************************************
1. Kadesh is also called Meribah, the seat of justice, or Meribath
Kadesh, the seat of justice at the holy spring. Meribah is in
its meaning the same as Midian.
*********************************************
Hence the narratives which are told before the arrival at Sinai are
repeated after the departure from it, because the locality is the
same before and after, namely, the wilderness of Kadesh, the true
scene of the Mosaic history. The institution of judges and elders
concludes the narrative before the great Sinai section, and begins
the narrative after it (Ex. xviii., Numbers xi ). The story of
the manna and the quails occurs not only in Exodus xvi., but also
in Numbers xi; and the rocky spring called forth by Moses at
Massah and Meribah is both in Exodus xvii. and Numbers xx. In
other words, the Israelites arrived at Kadesh, the original object
of their wanderings, not after the digression to Sinai but
immediately after the Exodus, and they spent there the forty
years of their residence in the wilderness. Kadesh is also the
original scene of the legislation. "There He made them statute and
judgment, and there He proved them," we read in a poetical
fragment, before the Sinai section (Exodus xv. 25), which is now
placed in the narrative of the healing of the waters at Marah, but
stands there quite isolated and without bearing on its context.
The curious conjunction of judgment and trial points unmistakably
to Massah and Meribah (ie., judgment and trial-place), that is, to
Kadesh, as the place spoken of. But the legislation at the seat of
judgment at Kadesh is not represented as a single act in which
Moses promulgates to the Israelites once for all a complete and
comprehensive body of laws; it goes on for forty years, and
consists in the dispensation of justice at the sanctuary, which he
begins and the priests and judges carry on after him according to
the pattern he set. This is the idea in the extremely
instructive narrative in Exodus xviii., of which Kadesh is the
scene. And in this way the Torah has its place in the historical
narrative, not in virtue of its matter as the contents of a code,
but from its form as constituting the professional activity of
Moses. It is in the history not as a result, as the sum of the
laws and usages binding on Israel, but as a process; it is shown
how it originated, how the foundation was laid for the living
institution of that Torah which still exists and is in force in
Israel.
The true and original significance of Sinai is quite independent
of the legislation. It was the seat of the Deity, the sacred
mountain, doubtless not only for the Israelites, but generally
for all the Hebrew and Cainite (Kenite) tribes of the surrounding
region. The priesthood of Moses and his successors was derived
from the priesthood there: there Jehovah appeared to him in the
burning bush when he was keeping the sheep of the priest of Midian,
from there He sent him to Egypt. There, to the Israelites, Jehovah
still dwelt long after they had settled in Palestine; in the song
of Deborah He is summoned to come from Sinai to succour His
oppressed people and to place Himself at the head of His
warriors. According to the view of the poet of Deuteronomy xxxiii.
the Israelites did not go to Jehovah to Sinai, but the converse;
He came to them from Sinai to Kadesh: "Jehovah came from Sinai
and shone from Seir unto them; He lightened from Mount Paran and
came to Meribath Kadesh." /1/
**************************************
1. We do not know where Sinai was situated, and the Bible is
scarcely at one on the subject. Only dilettanti care much for
controversy on the matter. The Midian of Exodus ii. tells us
most: it is probably Madian on the Arabic shore of the Ked sea.
In our passage Sinai seems to be S.E. of Edom; the way from
Sinai to Kadesh is by Seir and Paran.
******************************************
But it is not difficult to see how it came to be thought more seemly
that the Israelites should undertake the journey to Jehovah. This
was at first put in the form that they appeared there before the
face of Jehovah to worship Him and offer Him a sacrifice (Exodus
iii. 12), and at their departure they received the ark instead
of Jehovah Himself, who continued to dwell on Sinai (Exodus
xxxiii.); for the ark represents Jehovah, that constitutes its
significance, and not the tables of the law, which were not in it
at first. It was a further step to make Sinai the scene of the
solemn inauguration of the historical relation between Jehovah and
Israel. This was done under the poetic impulse to represent the
constituting of the people of Jehovah as a dramatic act on an
exalted stage. What in the older tradition was a process which
went on quietly and slowly, occupied completely the whole period
of Moses, and was at the beginning just such as it still continued
to be, was now, for the sake of solemnity and vividness,
compressed into a striking scene of inauguration. If this were
done, the covenant between Jehovah and Israel must receive a
positive (as well as a negative) character, that is to say,
Jehovah Himself must announce to the people the basis and the
conditions of it. Thus the necessity arose to communicate in
this place the contents of the fundamental laws, and so the matter
of the legislation made its way into the historical narrative.
But that it did not belong originally to this place we see from
the confusion which obtains even in the Jehovistic Sinai section
(Exodus xix.-xxiv., xxxii.-xxxiv.). The small bodies of laws
which are here communicated may in themselves be old enough,
but they are forced into the narrative. It is only of what is
relatively the most recent corpus, the Decalogue (in E), that
this cannot be asserted.
As the Jehovistic work was originally a pure history-book, so
Deuteronomy, when it was first discovered, was a pure law-book.
/1/
****************************************************
1. Chapters xii.-xxvii. The two historical introductions, chapter
i.-iv. and chapter v.-xi. were added later, as well as the
appendices, chapter xxviii. seq.
****************************************************
These two works, the historical and legal, were at first quite
independent of each other; only afterwards were they conjoined,
perhaps that the new law might share in the popularity of the old
people's book, and at the same time infuse into it its own spirit.
It made it the easier to do this, that, as we have just seen, a
piece of law had already been taken up into the Jehovistic
history-book. To the Decalogue, at the beginning of the period of
the forty years, was now added Deuteronomy at the close of that
period. The situation--of which the law itself knows nothing--is
very well chosen, not only because Moses is entitled when making
his testament to anticipate the future and make a law for the time
to come, but also because, the law being placed at the close of
his life, the thread of the narrative is not further interrupted,
the law being simply inserted between the Pentateuch and the Book
of Joshua. This combination of Deuteronomy with the Jehovist was
the beginning of the combination of narrative and law; and the
fact that this precedent was before the author of the Priestly
Code explains how, though his concern was with the Torah alone,
he yet went to work from the very outset and comprised in his work
the history of the creation, as if it also belonged to the Torah.
This manner of setting forth the Torah in the form of a history
book is not in the least involved in the nature of the case; on
the contrary, it introduces the greatest amount of awkwardness.
How it came about can only be explained in the way above
described; an antecedent process of the same nature in literary
history led the way and made the suggestion. /2/
*******************************************
2. That the author of the Priestly Code had before him the
combination of the Sinai legislation of the Jehovist and
Deuteronomy is shown further by the circumstance that he has both
a legislation at Mount Sinai and a legislation in the Arboth Moah,
and in addition to these one in the wilderness of Sinai.
********************************************
As from the literary point of view, so also from the historical,
the Moses of the Jehovist appears more original than the Moses of
the Priestly Code. To prove this is, it is true, the aim of the
entire present work: yet it will not on that account be thought
out of place if we take advantage of this convenient opportunity
for a brief sketch and criticism of the conflicting historical views
of Moses and his work in the two main sources of the Pentateuch.
According to the Priestly Code Moses is a religious founder and
legislator, as we are accustomed to think of him. He receives and
promulgates the Torah, /1/ perhaps not as a book--though, when we
**************************************
1. The law might accordingly be called Moses, as with the Ethiopians
the Psalter is called David,
**************************************
come to think of it, we can hardly represent the transaction to
ourselves in any other way--but certainly fixed and finished as
an elaborate and minutely organised system, which comprises the
sacred constitution of the congregation for all time to come.
The whole significance of Moses consists in the office of messenger
which he holds as mediator of the law; what else he does is of no
importance. That the law is given once for all is the great event
of the time, not that the people of Israel begins to appear on the
stage of the world. The people is there for the sake of the law,
not the law for the sake of the people. With the Jehovist, on the
contrary, Moses' work consists in this, that he delivers his
people from the Egyptians and cares for it in every way in the
wilderness. In the prelude scene from his youth, when he smites
the Egyptian and seeks to adjust the dispute of his brethren
(Exodus ii. 11 seq.), his whole history is prefigured. His care
for the Israelites embraces both catering for their sustenance,
and making and preserving peace and order among them (Numbers xi.).
The Torah is but a part of his activity, and proceeds from his
more general office as the guardian of the young people, who has,
as it were, to teach the fledgling to fly (Numbers xi. xii.).
According to Exodus xviii. his Torah is nothing but a giving of
counsel, a finding the way out of complications and difficulties
which had actually arisen. Individuals bring their different
cases before him; he pronounces judgment or gives advice, and in
so doing teaches the people the way they should go. Thus he is
the beginner of the teaching of Jehovah which lives on after him
in priest and prophet. Here all is life and movement: as Jehovah
Himself, so the man of God, is working in a medium which is alive;
is working practically, by no means theoretically, in history,
not in literature. His work and activity may be told in a
narrative, but the contents of it are more than a system, and are
not to be reduced to a compendium; it is not done and finished off,
it is the beginning of a series of infinite activities. In the
Priestly Code the work of Moses lies before us clearly defined
and rounded off; one living a thousand years after knows it as
well as one who saw it with his eyes. It is detached from its
originator and from his age: lifeless itself, it has driven the
life out of Moses and out of the people, nay, out of the very
Deity. This precipitate of history, appearing as law at the
beginning of the history, stifles and kills the history itself.
Which of the two views is the more historical, we can accordingly
be at no loss to decide. It may be added that in the older Hebrew
literature the founding of the nation and not the giving of the
law is regarded as the theocratic creative act of Jehovah. The
very notion of the law is absent: only covenants are spoken of,
in which the representatives of the people undertake solemn
obligations to do or leave undone something which is described
in general terms.
Another point of difference must be mentioned here, though indeed
it is a matter which has been before us more than once already.
That which is in the Priestly Code the subject-matter of the
Torah of Moses, namely, the institution of the cultus, the
Jehovist traces to the practice of the patriarchs--one more result
of the difference between law and legend. The Moses of the
Priestly Code conflicts not only with the future, but with the
past; he comes into collision with history on every side. That
view is manifestly the only natural one according to which the
worship is not specifically Israelite, not a thing instituted by
Moses in obedience to a sudden command of the Deity, but an
ancestral tradition. But at the time when the Priestly Code was
drawn up the worship was certainly the one thing that made Israel
Israel. In it the church, the one congregation of worship, takes
the place of the people even in the Mosaic age--sorely against
history, but characteristically for the author's point of view.
Now even such authorities as Bleek, Hupfeld, and Knobel have been
misled by the appearance of historical reality which the Priestly
Code creates by its learned art here as well as in the history
of the patriarchs. They have regarded the multiplicity of
numbers and names, the minute technical descriptions, the strict
keeping up of the scenery of camp-life, as so many signs of
authentic objectivity. Noldeke made an end of this critical
position once for all, but Colenso is properly entitled to the
credit of having first torn the web asunder. /1/
*****************************************
1. See Kuenen in the Theol. Tijdschrift, 1870, p. 393-401.
******************************************
The boldness with which numbers and names are stated, and the
preciseness of the details about indifferent matters of furniture,
do not prove them to be reliable: they are not drawn from
contemporary records, but are the fruit solely of late Jewish
fancy, a fancy which, it is well known, does not design nor
sketch, but counts and constructs, and produces nothing more than
barren plans. Without repeating the description of the tabernacle
in Exodus xxv. word for word, it is difficult to give an idea how
circumstantial it is; we must go to the source to satisfy
ourselves what the narrator can do in this line. One would imagine
that he was giving specifications to measurers for estimates, or
that he was writing for carpet-makers and upholsterers; but they
could not proceed upon his information, for the incredibly matter-
of-fact statements are fancy all the same, as was shown in chapter
i. The description of the tabernacle is supplemented in the Book
of Numbers by that of the camp; the former being the centre, this
is the circle drawn about it, and consists of an outer ring, the
twelve secular tribes, a middle ring, the Levites, and an innermost
one, the sons of Aaron: a mathematical demonstration of the
theocracy in the wilderness. The two first chapters contain the
census of the twelve tribes, and their allocation in four quarters,
nothing but names and numbers. To this first census chapter xxxiv.
adds another at the close of the forty years, in which the various
detailed figures are different, but the total is about the same.
This total, 600,000 warriors, comes from the older tradition, but
is proved to be quite worthless by the fact that in a really
authentic document the levy of Israel in the time of Deborah is
stated to be 40,000 strong. Still, the Priestly Code is entitled
to the credit of having made the total a little less round, and of
having broken it up into artificial component parts. The muster of
the people is followed in Numbers iii. iv. by the dedication of
the tribe of Levi to the sanctuary, in compensation for the
firstborn males of the Israelites who up to that time had not been
sacrificed nor yet redeemed. There are 22,273 firstborn males to
be provided for, and there are 22,000 male Levites above a month
old. The 273 extra firstborn males are specially redeemed at five
shekels a head. What accuracy! But what of the fact that a people
of at least two millions has only 22,273 firstborn males, or say
50,000 firstborn of both sexes? This gives an average of forty
children to every woman, for the firstborn in the sense of the law
is that which first opens the womb. The continuation of Numbers iii.
iv. is in chapter viii. As the Levites are an offering of firstlings
to the sanctuary on the part of the people, which, however, is not
to be sacrificed but made over to the priests, the characteristic
rite of this sort of sacred due has to be gone through with them,
namely, an act imitating that of throwing into the flame of the altar
(Aristeas 31,1. 5). To think of Moses and Aaron heaving the 22,000
men! Not less striking as an example of this kind of fiction is the
story of Numbers xxxi. Twelve thousand Israelites, a thousand from
each tribe, take the field against Midian, extirpate without any
fighting--at least nothing is anywhere said of this important
point--the whole people, slay all the men and a part of the women,
take captive the unmarried girls, and suffer themselves no loss
whatever. The latter point is asserted very definitely.
"The captains of thousands and the captains of hundreds came to
Moses, and said to him, Thy servants have taken the sum of the men
of war which are under our charge, and there lacketh not one of us."
Of the immeasurable booty of men and cattle Jehovah assigns half
to those who took the field and took part in the battle, the other
half to the congregation; and the former are to give the 500th
part to the priests, the latter the 50th part to the Levites. The
execution of this order is especially reported as follows:
"The booty which the men of war had taken was 675,000 sheep, 72,000
beeves, 61,000 asses, and 32,000 women that had not lain by man.
And the half which was the portion of them that went out to war
was 337,500 sheep, and Jehovah's tribute of the sheep was 675;
36,000 beeves, tribute to Jehovah 72; 30,500 asses, tribute to
Jehovah 61; 16,000 persons, tribute to Jehovah 32. And Moses
gave the tribute to Jehovah to Eleazar the priest. But the other
half, which Moses divided to the children of Israel, the half due
to the congregation, was 337,500 sheep, 36,000 beeves, 30,500 asses,
16,000 persons, and of the children of Israel's half Moses took one
of fifty and gave them to the Levites."
The calculation of the contribution to Jehovah was quite
easy for Moses, as the 500th part of the half is equivalent to
the 1000th part of the whole; he had only to leave off the
thousands from the first totals. In conclusion, the captains
brought offerings to Jehovah of golden dishes, chains, bracelets,
rings, and earrings, altogether 16,750 shekels weight, as
atonement for their souls
"But that was only the gold which the captains had taken as booty,
for the men of war had taken spoil, every man for himself."
We may perhaps be allowed to speculate as to the relation between
these 16,750 shekels which in this passage the captains alone offer
to the tabernacle OF THE GOLD ORNAMENTS OF THE MIDIANITES, and the
1700 shekels which in Judges viii. the whole people dedicate OF THE
GOLD ORNAMENTS OF THE MIDIANITES to set up an image in Ophra.
It is less easy to account on the theory of pure fiction for the
numerous names sometimes arranged together like a catalogue than
for reported circumstances and numbers. There can certainly be
no doubt that the forty places which are mentioned in the list of
encampments in the wanderings, really existed in the region the
Israelites are reported to have traversed. But he who is
satisfied with this as evidence that we have before us here a
historical document of primitive antiquity, will never be
disturbed by criticism. Was it such a difficult matter to find
out forty definite stations in the wilderness for the forty
years of the wanderings? Even if the elements of the composition
are not fictitious, that is far from proving the composition
itself to be authentic. And in the case of lists of the names of
persons, the elements are often of an extremely doubtful nature;
and here it is well to keep in view the principle of Vatke (op.
cit. p. 675) that no confidence is to be placed in subjects devoid
of predicates, and that persons are not to be taken for real who
have nothing to do. The dozens of names in Numbers i. vii. x.
are almost all made to the same pattern, and have no similarity
whatever to the names genuinely old. The fact that the name of
Jehovah does not enter into their composition only shows that the
composer was not forgetful of his religio-historical theory.
By its taste for barren names and numbers and technical
descriptions, the Priestly Code comes to stand on the same line
with the Chronicles and the other literature of Judaism which
labours at an artificial revival of the old tradition [VI.I.2
VI.III.2., VI.III.3. ad fin.]. Of a piece with this tendency is
an indescribable pedantry, belonging to the very being of the
author of the Priestly Code. He has a very passion for classifying
and drawing plans; if he has once dissected a genus into different
species, we get all the species named to us one by one every
time he has occasion to mention the genus. The subsuming use of
the prepositions Lamed and Beth is characteristic of him. He
selects a long-drawn expression wherever he can; he does not weary
of repeating for the hundredth time what is a matter of course
(Numbers viii.), he hates pronouns and all abbreviating substitutes.
What is interesting is passed over, what is of no importance is
described with minuteness, his exhaustive clearness is such as
with its numerous details to confuse our apprehension of what is
in itself perfectly clear. This is what used to be described
in the phraseology of historical criticism as epic breadth. /1/
**************************************
1. Riehm, p. 292. "The style is quiet, simple, free from all
rhetorical and poetical ornament, and the expression in speaking
of similar objects has an epic uniformity. Impressive as many
pieces are, just from their unassuming simplicity and
objectivity, there is nowhere any apparent effort to produce
effect or to raise the interest of the reader by the resources of
literary art." For an opposite opinion compare Lichtenberg,
Werke, ii. 162.
***************************************
VIII.III.2. Having thus attempted to describe the general contrast
of the Priestly Code and the Jehovist in the Mosaic period, it
remains for us to compare the several stories in the two works.
The Exodus from Egypt is everywhere regarded as the commencement
of Israelite history. In the Priestly Code it is made the epoch
of an era (Exodus xii. 2), which is afterwards dated from, not only
in years but even in months and days. It is unquestionable that
this precise style of dating only came into use among the Hebrews
at a very late period. *We find in the historical books only one
statement of the month in which an event took place (1Kings vi.
38), and in that case the day is not given. To the prophetic
writers dates were of some importance, and the growth of the
practice may to some extent be traced with them. Amos first came
forward "two years before the earthquake." /2/
*****************************************
2. Agh. xv. 11, 17: when al-Walid b. al-Mughira was dead, the
Arabs dated after his death to the year of the elephant, which
thereafter was made an epoch. According to others they reckoned
nine years after the death of Hisham b. al-Mughira, to the time
when they built the Caaba, and then they dated from the building
of the Caaba. Comp. the 'Am al Ramada and the 'Am al Ru'af.
******************************************
The most precise date in Isaiah is "the year in which king Uzziah
died." Numbers of years are first found in Jeremiah, "the thirteenth
year of king Josiah," and a few more instances. All at once there was
a change: Haggai and Zechariah, prophets who grew up in the Babylonian
exile, always give dates, not only the year and month, but the day of
the month as well. In the Priestly Code this precise reckoning,
which the Jews obviously learned from the Chaldeans, is in use
from the age of Moses onwards.
In the Jehovist the ostensible occasion of the Exodus is a festival
which the children of Israel desire to hold in honour of their God
in the wilderness. In the Priestly Code this occasion
disappears; there can be no pre-Mosaic festivals. But with this
the reason falls away for which Jehovah kills the firstborn of the
Egyptians, He does it because the king of Egypt is keeping from Him
the firstborn of the Israelites, which ought to be offered to Him
at the festival; for the celebration in question is the sacrificial
festival of the first-fruits of cattle in spring. In the older
tradition the festival is the first thing; it explains the circumstances
of the Exodus and the time of year at which it took place: in the
later one the relation is reversed--the killing of the firstborn of
the Egyptians leads to the sacrifice of the firstborn of Israel,
the Exodus in spring is followed by the festival in spring as its
consequence. The Priestly Code follows this younger tradition,
and deviates from the original account still more widely in the
view it gives of the passover. It obliterates completely the
connection between the passover and the sacrifice of the
firstborn, and represents it not as a giving of thanks to Jehovah
for having slain the firstborn of Egypt, but as instituted at the
moment of the Exodus to induce Jehovah to spare the firstborn of
Israel. How all this is to be understood and judged of we have
discussed more at large in the chapter on the festivals (III.I.1.,
III.III.1.).
As to the accounts given in the two sources of the crossing of the
Red Sea, all we can say is that that of the Jehovist (J) is the
more complicated. According to him the sea is dried up by a
strong wind, and the Egyptians succeed at first in crossing it,
and encounter the Hebrews on the eastern shore during he night.
"But in the morning watch Jehovah turned, in the pillar of fire
and of the cloud, against the host of the Egyptian, and overthrew
the host of the Egyptian, and hindered the wheels of his chariot
and caused him to drive heavily. Then the Egyptian said: I will
flee before Israel, for Jehovah fighteth for them against Egypt.
But the sea turned back towards morning to its ordinary level,
and the Egyptians fled against it, and Jehovah shook them into
the midst of the sea" (Exodus xiv. 24, 25, 27).
According to the Priestly Code /1/ the waves meet over the pursuers,
**************************************
1. And the younger tradition generally: also according to the
song Exodus xv., which apart from the beginning, which is old,
is a psalm in the manner of the Psalms and has no similarity
with the historical songs, Judges v., 2Samuel i., Numbers xxi.
*************************************
before they reach the further shore; the idea is much simpler,
but poorer in incidental features.
The miracle of the manna (Exodus xvi.) is taken advantage of
in the Priestly Code as a very suitable occasion for urging on
the people a strict sanctification of the Sabbath: none falls
on the seventh day, but what is gathered on the sixth keeps two
days, while at other times it requires to be eaten quite fresh.
This pursuit of a legal object destroys the story and obscures
its original meaning, as no one can help seeing. Nor is it any
sign of originality, rather of senility, that in the Priestly Code
the manna is not eaten raw, but boiled and baked.
At Mount Sinai Moses receives, according to the Priestly Code,
the revelation of--the model of the tabernacle, and he follows
the pattern thus presented to him in the construction, down below,
of the real tabernacle. All further revelation takes place, even
in Moses' time, as far as possible in the tabernacle (Exodus xxv.
22). Even Sinai must not stand any longer than necessary by the
side of the one legitimate seat of Deity. /1/
******************************************
1. Compare, however, Jahrbb.fur Deutsche Theologie, 1877, p. 453,
note 1.
*******************************************
The tables of the law, it appears, are silently presupposed
without being mentioned beforehand, it being of course assumed
that the readers would know all about them from the old tradition.
The outside of the ark, however, is furnished in the most extravagant
style, and with a splendour which other descriptions of the chest
of acacia-wood are far from suggesting. The ark in the Priestly Code
differs indeed in every way from the appearance of it in 1Kings
vii. 23 seq. We are reminded of the Haggada by the covering which
Moses has to put before his face, which is shining with the reflection
of the glory of Jehovah (Exodus xxxiv. 29-35), and by the making of
the brazen laver of the looking-glasses of the women who serve the
temple (Exodus xxxviii. 8, cf. Numbers xvii. 1, 9); these traits
do not, it is true, belong to the original contents of the Priestly
Code, but they belong to its circle.
From Sinai the old tradition takes us by this and that station,
mentioned by name, without delay to Kadesh. Here the chief part
of the forty years' sojourn in the wilderness is spent; this,
as we said before, is the true scene of all the stories that are
told about Moses. The Priestly Code takes us in this period, as
in the legend of the patriarchs, not to definite places, but up and
down in the wilderness of Sinai, in the wilderness of Paran, in
the wilderness of Sin. Kadesh is with evident intention thrust as
far as possible into the background--no doubt on account of the
high sanctity the place originally had as the encampment for
many years of the Israelites under Moses.
The spies are sent out according to the Jehovist from Kadesh,
according to the Priestly Code from the wilderness of Paran.
In the former authority they penetrate to Hebron, whence they
bring back with them fine grapes, but they find that the land
where these grow is not to be conquered. In the latter they
proceed without any difficulty throughout the whole of Palestine
to Lebanon, but have nothing to bring back with them, and advise
against attacking the land because they have not found it
particularly desirable, as if its advantages had been accessible
to faith alone and not to be discovered by unbelieving eyes, as
was actually the case in the time of Haggai and Zechariah, and at
the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. To the genuine Israelite of old,
however, the goodness of his beloved land was not a mere point of
faith which he could ever have doubted. In the former source, as
we judge from Deuteronomy i. 23, only the number of the spies was
given; in the latter all the twelve are named. In the former
Caleb is the only good spy, in the latter Caleb and Joshua. At
first probably neither the one nor the other belonged to this
story; but Caleb easily came to be named as an exception,
because he actually conquered the district from Kadesh to Hebron,
which the spies had declared it impossible to take, and which the
Israelites, alarmed by their account, had not ventured to attack.
Joshua, again, was added from the consideration that, according to
the principle enunciated by the Jehovist in Numbers xiv. 23, 24,
he must have shared the merit of Caleb, because he partook of the
same exceptional reward with him.
In the Jehovist Moses alone instructs the spies and receives their
report on their return; in the Priestly Code Moses and Aaron do
so. In the oldest source of the Jehovist (J) Aaron has not yet
made his appearance; in the Priestly Code Moses must not do any
public act without him. /1/
*******************************************
1. In the same way, in the former source Joshua always acts alone;
in the latter, he always has the priest Eleazar at his side.
Compare notes [in IV.III.2.]
*******************************************
Moses is still the moving spirit here as well as there, but Aaron
is the representative of the theocracy, and pains are taken to
secure that he shall never be absent where the representatives of
the theocracy are brought face to face with the community. The
desire to introduce the leader of the hierocracy, and with its
leader the hierocracy itself, into the Mosaic history, has borne
the most remarkable fruits in the so-called story of the rebellion
of the company of Korah. According to the Jehovistic tradition
the rebellion proceeds from the Reubenites, Dathan, and Abiram,
prominent members of the firstborn tribe of Israel, and is directed
against MOSES AS LEADER AND JUDGE OF THE PEOPLE. According to the
version of the main-stock of the Priestly Code (Q), the author of
the agitation is Korah, a prince of the tribe of Judah, and he rebels
not only against Moses, but against MOSES AND AARON AS REPRESENTING
THE PRIESTHOOD. In a later addition, which, to judge from its style,
belongs likewise to the Priestly Code, but not to its original
contents, the Levite Korah appears at the head of a revolt of the
Levites against AARON AS HIGH PRIEST, and demands the equalisation
of the lower with the higher clergy. Starting from the Jehovistic
version, the historical basis of which is dimly discerned to be the
fall of Reuben from its old place at the head of the brother-tribes,
we have no difficulty in seeing how the second version arose out of
it. The people of the congregation, i.e., of the church, having once
come on the scene, the spiritual heads, Moses and Aaron, take the
place of the popular leader Moses, and the jealousy of the secular
grandees is now directed against the class of hereditary priests,
instead of against the extraordinary influence on the community of
a heaven-sent hero. All these changes are the natural outcome of
the importation of the hierocracy into Mosaic times. From the
second version we can go further and understand the origin of the
third. In the earlier version the princes of the tribe of Reuben
were forced to give way to a prince of the tribe of Judah. In
the progress of time Korah the prince of the tribe of Judah is
replaced by the eponymous head of a post-exilic Levitical family,
of the same name. The contest between clergy and aristocracy is
here transformed into a domestic strife between the higher and the
inferior clergy, which was no doubt raging in the time of the
narrator. Thus the three versions are developed, the origin and
collocation of which appears from every other point of view to be
an insoluble enigma. The one arises out of the other in the
direct line of descent: the metamorphoses took place under the
influence of great historical changes which are well known to us;
and in the light of Jewish history from Josiah downwards they
are by no means unintelligible. /1/
********************************************
1 The details of the demonstration will be found in the Jahrbb.
fuer Deutsche Theologie, 1776, p. 572 seq., 1877, p. 454, note,
and in the Leyden Theol. Tijdschrift, 1878, p. 139 seq.
********************************************
We come to the migration of the Israelites to the land east of the
Jordan. According to the Jehovist the neighbouring tribes place
obstacles in their way, and the land in which they desire to
settle has to be conquered with the sword. The Priestly Code tells
us as little of all this as in an earlier instance of the war with
Amalek; from all it says we should imagine that the Israelites went
straight to their mark and met with no difficulty in the region
in question; the land is ownerless, and the possession of it is
granted by Moses and Eleazar to the two tribes Reuben and Gad
(Numbers xxxii.). But that war may not be completely wanting
under Moses, we have afterwards the war with the Midianites, on
which we have already commented (Numbers xxxi.). There is not much
story about it, only numbers and directions; and in verse 27
there is a suspicion of 1Samuel xxx. 24, as if that passage were
the groundwork of the whole. The passage is extremely
interesting as showing us the views taken of war by the Jews of
the later time who had grown quite unaccustomed to it. The
occasion of the war also is noticeable; it is undertaken not for
the acquisition of territory, nor with any other practical
object, but only to take vengeance on the Midianites for having
seduced some of the Israelites to uncleanness.
The elders of Midian, so the story goes, went to the soothsayer
Balaam to ask his advice as to what should be done against the
Israelite invaders. He suggested a means by which the edge of
the invasion might be broken; the Midianites should give their
daughters to the Israelites for wives, and so deprive the holy
people of their strength, the secret of which lay in their
isolation from other peoples. The Midianites took Balaam's advice
and succeeded in entangling many of the Israelites with the
charms of their women; in consequence of which Jehovah visited
the faithless people with a severe plague. The narrative of the
Priestly Code up to this point has to be pieced together from Numbers
xxxi. 8, 16 and Joshua xiii. 22, and from what is implied in the
sequel of it; at this point the portion of it begins which is
preserved to us (Numbers xxv. 6 seq.), and we are told how the
plague was ultimately stayed. A certain man coolly brings a
Midianitish woman into the camp before the very eyes of Moses and
the weeping children of Israel: then the young hereditary priest
Phinehas takes a spear, transfixes the godless pair, and by this
zeal averts the anger of Jehovah. This narrative is based on the
Jehovistic one, which is also preserved to us only in part (Numbers
xxv. 1-5), about the backsliding of Israel in the camp of Shittim
to the service of Baal-Peor, to which they were seduced by the
daughters of Moab. In the Priestly Code the idolatry has quite
disappeared, all but some unconscious reminiscences, and no
sin is alleged but that of whoredom, which in the original story
merely led up to the main offence. This is done manifestly with
the idea that marriage with foreign women is in itself a falling
away from Jehovah, a breach of the covenant. This change was
extremely suitable to the circumstances of exilic and post-exilic
Judaism, for in these later days there was no immediate danger of
gross idolatry, but it took a good deal of trouble to prevent
heathenism from making its way into the midst of the people under
the friendly form of mixed marriages. The version of the
Priestly Code, however, mixes up with the Baal-Peor story of the
Jehovist the figure of Balaam, which is also borrowed from the
Jehovist but entirely transformed in the process. In the form
under which he appears in the early history he transgresses all
the ideas of the Priestly Code. An Aramaean seer, who is hired
for money and makes all sorts of heathen preparations to
prophesy, but who yet is not an impostor, but a true prophet as
much as any in Israel, who even stands in the most intimate
relations with Jehovah, though cherishing the intention of cursing
Jehovah's people--that is too much for exclusive Judaism. The
correction is effected by the simple device of connecting Balaam
with the following section, and making him the intellectual
instigator of the devilry of the Midianitish women; and in this
new form which he assumes in the Priestly Code he lives on in the
Haggada. The reason for changing the Moabites into Midianites
is not made clear; but the fact is undoubted that the Midianites
never lived in that part of the world.
In the Book of Numbers the narrative sections, which are in the
style and colour of the Priestly Code, have more and more the
character of mere additions and editorial supplements to a
connection which was already there and had a different origin.
The independent main stock of the Priestly Code, the Book of the
Four Covenants, or the Book of Origins (Q), more and more gives way
to later additions, and ceases altogether, it appears, at the
death of Moses. It is at least nowhere to be traced in the first
half of the Book of Joshua, and so we cannot reckon as part of it
those extensive sections of the second half, belonging to the
Priestly Code, which treat of the division of the land. Without a
preceding history of the conquest these sections are quite in the
air; they cannot be taken as telling a continuous story of
their own, but presuppose the Jehovistic-Deuteronomic work. In
spite of distaste to war and to records of war (1Chronicles xxii.
8, xxviii. 3), an independent work like the Book of the Four Covenants
could not possibly have passed over the wars of Joshua in silence.
A comparison of the different accounts of the entry of the
Israelite tribes into the occupation of the conquered land may
close this discussion. The Priestly Code, agreeing in this with
the Deuteronomistic revision, represents the whole of Canaan as
having been made a _tabula rasa_, and then, masterless and denuded
of population, submitted to the lot. First the tribe of Judah
receives its lot, then Manasseh and Ephraim, then the two tribes
which attached themselves to Ephraim and Judah, Benjamin and
Simeon, and lastly the five northern tribes, Zebulon, Issachar,
Asher, Naphtali, Dan.
"These are the inheritances which Eleazar the priest, and Joshua
ben Nun, and the heads of the tribes of the children of Israel
divided for an inheritance by lot in Shiloh before Jehovah at
the door of the tabernacle."
According to the Jehovist, Judah and Joseph appear to have had
their territory allocated to them at Gilgal (xiv. 6), and not by
lot, and to have entered into occupation of it from there. A good
while afterwards the land remaining over is divided by lot among
the seven small tribes still unprovided for, from Shiloh, or
perhaps originally from Shechem (xviii. 2-10). Joshua alone
casts the lot and gives instructions; Eleazar the priest does not
act with him. Even here the general principle of the Priestly
Code, which knows no differences among the tribes, is somewhat
limited; but it is much more decidedly contradicted by
the important chapter, Judges i.
The chapter is, in fact, not a continuation of the Book of Joshua
at all, but a parallel to it, which, while it presupposes the
conquest of the east-Jordan lands, does not speak of the
west-Jordan lands as conquered, but tells the story of the
conquest, and that in a manner somewhat differing from the other
source. From Gilgal, where the "Angel of Jehovah" first set up
his tent, the tribes march out one by one to conquer their "lot"
by fighting; first Judah, then Joseph. We hear only of these two,
and with regard to Joseph we only hear of the very beginning of
the conquest of his land. There is no mention of Joshua; nor
would his figure as commander-general of Israel suit the view here
given of the situation; though it would very well admit of him as
leader of his tribe. The incompleteness of the conquest is
acknowledged unreservedly; the Canaanites lived on quietly in the
cities of the plain, and not till the period of the monarchy,
when Israel had grown strong, were they subdued and made tributary.
This chapter, as well as the main stem of the Book of Judges,
corresponds to the Jehovistic stratum of the tradition, to which
also passages in Joshua, of an identical or similar import, may
be added without hesitation. The Angel of Jehovah is enough to tell
us this. The difference which exists between it and the
Jehovistic main version in the Book of Joshua is to be explained
for the most part by the fact that the latter is of Ephraimite origin,
and in consequence ascribes the conquest of the whole land to the
hero of Ephraim or of Joseph, while Judges i. leans more to the tribe
of Judah. Moreover, we find in the Book of Joshua itself the remnant
of a version (ix. 4-7, 12-14) in which, just as in Judges i., the
actors are the "men of Israel," who "ask counsel of the mouth of
Jehovah," while elsewhere Joshua alone has anything to say, being
the successor of Moses, and drawing his decisions from no source
but the authority of his own spirit. And finally, we have to consider
Exodus xxiii., 20 seq., where also there is a correspondence with
Judges i., in the fact that not Joshua but the Angel of Jehovah
(Judges v. 23) is the leader of Israel, and that the promised land
is not conquered all at once but gradually, in the process of time.
Judges i. presents certain anachronisms, and is partly made up of
anecdotes, but these should not prevent us from acknowledging that
the general view given in this chapter of the process of the
conquest, is, when judged by what we know of the subsequent
period of Israel, incomparably more historical than that in the
Book of Joshua, where the whole thing is done at once with
systematic thoroughness, the whole land being first denuded of its
inhabitants, and then divided by lot among the different tribes.
The latter view may have come about partly from a literal
interpretation of "lot" (Judges xviii. 1), an expression which
properly applies to the farm of a family but is here used for the
territory of a tribe. It was also favoured no doubt by the
tendency to compress a long development into its first great act;
and as this tendency is carried out with the greatest
thoroughness in the Priestly Code, that document stands furthest
from the origin of the tradition. /1/ The same conclusion is led up
******************************************
1. In the Deuteronomistic revision (Joshua xxi, 43-45) there is
still a trace of hesitation, a certain difficulty in parting with
the old view altogether (Deuteronomy vii. 22; Judg. iii. 1, 2);
and besides the motives for the change are much plainer here:
the Canaanites are extirpated to guard against the infection of the
new settlers with their idolatary.
*****************************************
to by the circumstance that the tribe of Joseph is never mentioned,
one of the two tribes, Ephraim and Manasseh, being always spoken of
instead, and that these two tribes are almost put out of sight by
Judah. And yet Joshua, the leader of Ephraim, is leader here also
of all Israel, having been preserved from the old original tradition,
which was Ephraimitic.
It involves no contradiction that, in comparing the versions of the
tradition, we should decline the historical standard in the case
of the legend of the origins of mankind and of the legend of the
patriarchs, while we employ it to a certain extent for the epic
period of Moses and Joshua. The epic tradition certainly
contains elements which cannot be explained on any other
hypothesis than that there are historical facts underlying them;
its source is in the period it deals with, while the patriarchal
legend has no connection whatever with the times of the
patriarchs. /1/ This justifies the difference of treatment.
*********************************************
1. Some isolated statements there are here also to which the
historical standard may be applied. We may call it a more
accurate representation that Hebron was inhabited in the time of
Abraham by the, Canaanites and Perizzites, than that the Hittites
dwelt there at that time. The latter, according to 2Samuel
xxiv. 6 (Bleek, Einleitung, 4th edition, pp. 228, 597), dwelt in
Coele-Syria, and according to 2Kings vii. 6, in the neihbourhood
of the Aramaeans of Damascus. The statement that the Israelites
received from Pharaoh because they were shepherds the pasture-land
of Goshen on the north-east frontier of Egypt and there dwelt by
themselves, is to be preferred to the statement that they were
settled among the Egyptians in the best part of the land,
**********************************************
Our last result is still the same: whether tried by the standard of
poetry or by that of history, the Priestly Code stands both in
value and in time far below the Jehovist.
VIII.III.3. In rough strokes I have sought to place before the
reader's view the contrast between the beginning and the end of
the tradition of the Hexateuch. It would not be impossible to trace
the inner development of the tradition in the intermediate stages
between the two extremities. To do this we should have to make
use of the more delicate results of the process of source-sifting,
and to call to our aid the hints, not numerous indeed, but
important, which are to be found in Deuteronomy and in the
historical and prophetical books, especially Hosea. It would
appear that legend from its very nature causes those who deal with
it to strike out variations, that it cannot be represented
objectively at all. Even at the first act of reducing it to
writing the discolouring influences are at work, without any
violence being done to the meaning which dwells in the matter.
We can trace first of all the influence on the tradition of that
specific prophetism which we are able to follow from Amos onwards.
This is least traceable in the old main source of the Jehovist,
in J; and yet it is remarkable that the Asheras never occur in
the worship of the patriarchs. The second Jehovistic source, E,
breathes the air of the prophets much more markedly, and shows a
more advanced and thorough-going religiosity. Significant in this
view are the introduction of Abraham as a Nabi, Jacob's burying the
teraphim, the view taken of the macceba at Shechem (Jos. xxiv.
27), and above all the story of the golden calf. The Deity
appears less primitive than in J, and does not approach men in
bodily form, but calls to them from heaven, or appears to them in
dreams. The religious element has become more refined, but at the
same time more energetic, and has laid hold even of elements
heterogeneous to itself, producing on occasion such strange
mixtures as that in Genesis xxxi. 10-13. Then the law comes in
and leavens the Jehovistic narrative, first the Deuteronomic (in
Genesis even, and then quite strongly in Exodus and Joshua), while
last of all, in the Priestly Code, under the influence of the
legislation of the post-exile restoration, there is brought about
a complete metamorphosis of the old tradition. The law is the key
to the understanding even of the narrative of the Priestly Code.
All the distinctive peculiarities of the work are connected with
the influence of the law: everywhere we hear the voice of theory,
rule, judgment. What was said above of the cultus may be
repeated word for word of the legend: in the early time it may
be likened to the green tree which grows out of the ground as it
will and can; at a later time it is dry wood that is cut and made
to a pattern with compass and square. It is an extraordinary
objection to this when it is said that the post-exile period had
no genius for productions such as the tabernacle or the chronology.
It certainly was not an original age, but the matter was all there
in writing, and did not require to be invented. What great genius
was needed to transform the temple into a portable tent? What sort
of creative power is that which brings forth nothing but numbers
and names? In connection with such an age there can be no question
at least of youthful freshness. With infinitely greater justice
may it be maintained that such theoretical modelling and adaptation
of the legend as is practiced in the Priestly Code, could only gain
an entrance when the legend had died away from the memory and
the heart of the people, and was dead at the root.
The history of the pre-historic and the epic tradition thus passed
through the same stages as that of the historic; and in this
parallel the Priestly Code answers both as a whole, and in every
detail, to the Chronicles. The connecting link between old and
new, between Israel and Judaism, is everywhere Deuteronomy.
The Antar-romance says of itself, that it had attained an age of
670 years, 400 years of which it had spent in the age of ignorance
(i.e. old Arabic heathenism), and the other 270 in Islam. The
historical books of the Bible might say something similar, if
they were personified, and their life considered to begin with
the reduction to writing of the oldest kernel of the tradition and
to close with the last great revision. The time of ignorance
would extend to the appearance of "the book," which, it is true,
did not in the Old Testament come down from heaven all at once
like the Koran, but came into existence during a longer period,
and passed through various phases.
C. ISRAEL AND JUDAISM.
"The Law came in between."--VATKE, p. 183.
CHAPTER IX. CONCLUSION OF THE CRITICISM OF THE LAW.
Objections have been made to the general style of the proof on
which Graf's hypothesis is based. It is said to be an illicit
argument _ex silentio_ to conclude from the fact that the priestly
legislation is latent in Ezekiel, where it should be in operation,
unknown where it should be known, that in his time it had not yet
come into existence. But what would the objectors have? Do they
expect to find positive statements of the non-existence of what
had not yet come into being? Is it more rational, to deduce _ex
silentio_, as they do, a positive proof that it did exist?-_to say,
that as there are no traces of the hierocracy in the times of the
judges and the kings it must have originated in the most remote
antiquity, with Moses? The problem would in this case still be
the same, namely, to explain how it is that with and after the
exile the hierocracy begins to come into practical activity.
What the opponents of Graf's hypothesis call its argument _ex
silentio_, is nothing more or less than the universally valid
method of historical investigation.
The protest against the argument _ex silentio_ takes another form.
It is pointed out that laws are in many cases theories, and that
it is no disproof of the existence of a theory that it has not
got itself carried out into practice. Deuteronomy was really
nothing more than a theory during the pre-exile period, but who
would argue from this that it was not there at all? Though laws
are not kept, this does not prove they are not there,--provided,
that is to say, that there is sufficient proof of their existence
on other grounds. But these other proofs of the existence of the
Priestly Code are not to be found--not a trace of them. It is,
moreover, rarely the case with laws that they are theory and
nothing more: the possibility that a thing may be mere theory
is not to be asserted generally, but only in particular cases.
And even where law is undoubtedly theory, the fact does not
prevent us from fixing its position in history. Even legislative
fancy always proceeds upon some definite presupposition or other;
and these presuppositions, rather than the laws themselves, must
guide the steps of historical criticism. /1/
*******************************************
1. Cf. . This is
the reason why the strata of the tradition require to be compared as
carefully as those of the law.
******************************************
An argument which is the very opposite of this is also urged.
The fact is insisted on that the laws of the Priestly Code are
actually attested everywhere in the practice of the historical
period; that there were always sacrifices and festivals, priests
and purifications, and everything of the kind in early Israel.
These statements must, though this seems scarcely possible,
proceed on the assumption that on Graf's hypothesis the whole
cultus was invented all at once by the Priestly Code, and only
introduced after the exile. But the defenders of Graf's
hypothesis do not go so far as to believe that the Israelite cultus
entered the world of a sudden,--as little by Ezekiel or by Ezra
as by Moses,--else why should they be accused of Darwinism by
Zoeckler and Delitzsch? They merely consider that the works of
the law were done before the law, that there is a difference
between traditional usage and formulated law, and that even where
this difference appears to be only in form it yet has a material
basis, being connected with the centralisation of the worship and
the hierocracy which that centralisation called into existence.
Here also the important point is not the matter, but the spirit
which is behind it, and may everywhere be recognised as the
spirit of the age at one period or another. /2/
******************************************
2. Comp.
******************************************
All these objections, meanwhile, labour under the same defect,
namely, that they leave out of view that which is the real point
at issue. The point is not to prove that the Mosaic law was not
in force in the period before the exile. There are in the
Pentateuch three strata of law and three strata of tradition, and
the problem is to place them in their true historical order. So
far as the Jehovist and Deuteronomy are concerned, the problem
has found a solution which may be said to be accepted
universally, and all that remains is to apply to the Priestly Code
also the procedure by which the succession and the date of these
two works has been determined--that procedure consisting in the
comparison of them with the ascertained facts of Israelite
history. /3/
**************************************
3. The method is stated in the introduction: and special pains are
taken to bring it out distinctly in the first chapter, that about
the place of worship.
*****************************************
One would imagine that this could not be objected to. But
objections have been raised; the procedure which, when applied to
Deuteronomy, is called historico-critical method, is called, when
applied to the Priestly Code, construction of history. But
history, it is well known, has always to be constructed: the
order, Priestly Code, Jehovist, Deuteronomy, is not a thing
handed down by tradition or prescribed by the nature of the case,
but a hypothesis as yet only a score of years old or thereby, the
reasons for which were somewhat incomprehensible, so that people
have forgotten them and begun to regard the hypothesis as
something objective, partaking of the character of dogma. The
question is whether one constructs well or ill. Count Baudissin
thinks a grave warning necessary of a certain danger, that,
namely, of an exaggerated application of logic: that the laws
follow each other in a certain order logically, he says, does not
prove that they appeared in the same order in history. But it is
not for the sake of logical sequence that we consider the
development which began with the prophets to have issued finally
in the laws of cultus; and those who set out from "sound human
reason" have generally forced the reverse process of this on the
history, in spite of the traces which have come down to us, and
which point the other way. /1/
**************************************
1. And it would not be surprising when we consider the whole
character of the polemic against Graf's hypothesis, if the next
objection should be the very opposite of the above, viz. that it
is not able to construct the history.
*************************************
After laboriously collecting the data offered by the historical
and prophetical books, we constructed a sketch of the Israelite
history of worship; we then compared the Pentateuch with this
sketch, and recognised that one element of the Pentateuch bore
a definite relation to this phase of the history of worship, and
another element of the Pentateuch to that phase of it. This is not
putting logic in the place of historical investigation. The new
doctrine of the irrationality of what exists is surely not to be
pushed so far, as that we should regard the correspondence between
an element of the law and a particular phase of the history as a
reason for placing the two as far as possible asunder. At least
this principle would have to be applied to the Jehovist and
Deuteronomy too, and not to the Priestly Code only. What is
right in the one case is fair in the other too; a little logic
unfortunately is almost unavoidable.
Not everything that I have brought forward in the history of the
cultus and the tradition, is a proof of the hypothesis; there is
much that serves merely to explain phenomena at the basis of the
hypothesis, and cannot be used as proving it. This is a matter
of course. My procedure has intentionally differed from that of
Graf in this respect. He brought forward his arguments somewhat
unconnectedly, not seeking to change the general view which prevailed
of the history of Israel. For this reason he made no impression
on the majority of those who study these subjects; they did not see
into the root of the matter, they could still regard the system
as unshaken, and the numerous attacks on details of it as
unimportant. I differ from Graf chiefly in this, that I always
go back to the centralisation of the cultus, and deduce from it the
particular divergences. My whole position is contained in my
first chapter: there I have placed in a clear light that which is
of such importance for Israelite history, namely, the part taken
by the prophetical party in the great metamorphosis of the
worship, which by no means came about of itself. Again I attach
much more weight than Graf did to the change of ruling ideas which
runs parallel with the change in the institutions and usages of
worship; this has been shown mostly in the second part of the
present work. Almost more important to me than the phenomena
themselves, are the presuppositions which lie behind them.
Not everything that we have hitherto discussed proves, or is meant
to prove, Graf's hypothesis. On the other hand, however, there is
abundance of evidence, which has not yet been noticed. To discuss
it all in detail, would take another book: in this work only a
selection can be with all brevity indicated, if the limits are
not to be transgressed which are imposed by the essentially
historical character of these prolegomena. In these discussions
the Pro will as a rule naturally suggest itself in the refutation
of the Contra.
IX.I.
IX.I.1. Eberhard Schrader mentions, in his Introduction to the Old
Testament, that Graf assigns the legislation of the middle books
of the Pentateuch to the period after the exile; but he does not
give the least idea of the arguments on which that position is
built up, simply dismissing it with the remark, that "even
critical analysis enters its veto" against it. Even critical
analysis? How does it manage that? How can it prove that the
one and sole cultus, worked out on every side to a great system,
the denaturalising of the sacrifices and festivals, the distinction
between the priests and Levites, and the autonomous hierarchy, are
older than the Deuteronomic reform? Schrader's meaning is
perhaps, that while the signs collected by a comparison of the
sources as bearing on the history of worship show the order of
succession to be Jehovist, Deuteronomy, Priestly Code, other
signs of a more formal and literary nature would show the Priestly
Code to be entitled to the first place, or at any rate not the
last, and that the latter kind of evidence is of as much force as
the former. Were this so, the scales would be equally balanced,
and the question would not admit of a decision. But this awkward
situation would only occur if the arguments of a literary nature
to be urged on that side really balanced those belonging to the
substance of the case which plead for Graf's hypothesis. In
discussing the composition of the Hexateuch, /1/
********************************************
1. Jahrb. Deutsche Theol., 1876, p. 392 seq, 531 seq; 1877,
p. 407 seq.
*********************************************
I have shown, following in the steps of other scholars, that this
is by no means the case; and for the sake of completeness I will
here repeat the principal points of that discussion.
IX.I.2. It is asserted that the historical situation of Deuteronomy
is based not only on the Jehovistic, but also on the Priestly
narrative. Deuteronomy proper (chaps. xii.-xxvi.) contains
scarcely any historical matter, but before Moses comes to the
business in hand, we have two introductions, chapter v.-xi. and
chapter i.-iv., to explain the situation in which he promulgates
"this Torah" shortly before his death. We are in the Amorite
kingdom, east of the Jordan, which has already been conquered.
The forty years' wanderings are about to close: the passage to
the land of Canaan, for which this legislation is intended, is
just approaching. Till this time, we hear in chapter v. 9, 10,
the only law was that which is binding in all circumstances, and
was therefore promulgated by God Himself from Horeb, the Law of
the Ten Words on that occasion. The people deprecated any
further direct revelation by Jehovah, and commissioned Moses to
be their representative; and he accordingly betook himself to the
sacred mount, stayed there forty days and forty nights, and
received the two tables of the decalogue, and besides them the
statutes and laws which now, forty years after, he is on the
point of publishing, as they will come into force at the
settlement. In the meantime the golden calf had been made down
below; and when Moses descended from the mount, in his anger he
broke the tables and destroyed the idol. Then he betook himself
for a second period of forty days and nights to the mount, pleaded
for mercy for the people and for Aaron; and after he had made,
according to divine command, two new tables and a wooden chest
for them, Jehovah once more wrote down exactly what stood on the
tables which were broken. On this occasion, it is remarked in x.
8 seq., the Levites received their appointment as priests.
This is evidently a reproduction of the Jehovistic narrative,
Exodus xix. xx. xxiv. xxxii-xxxiv. The Priestly Code, on the
contrary, is entirely ignored. Deuteronomy knows only two
laws, the decalogue, which the people received, and the statutes
and judgments which Moses received, at Mount Horeb. They were
both given at the same time, one directly after the other: but
only the decalogue had till now been made public. Where is the
whole wilderness-legislation as given from the tabernacle? Is
it not denying the very notion of its existence, that Moses only
publishes the Torah at the passage into the Holy Land, because it
has application and force for that land, and not for the
wilderness? Apart from the fact that the Deuteronomist,
according to chapter xii., knew nothing of a Mosaic central
sanctuary, can he have read what we now read between Exodus xxiv.
and xxxii.? He passes over all that is there inserted from the
Priestly Code. Noldeke finds, it is true, /1 /
*********************************************
1. Jahrbb. fuer prot. Theologie, 1875, p. 350.
**********************************************
a reminiscence of that code in the ark of acacia wood, Deuteronomy
x. 1. But the ark is here spoken of in a connection which answers
exactly to that of the Jehovist (Exod xxxii. xxxiii.), and is
quite inconsistent with that, of the Priestly Code (Exodus xxv.
seq.). It is only instituted after the erection of the golden
calf, not at the very beginning of the divine revelation, as the
foundation-stone of the theocracy. True, the ark is not mentioned
in JE, Exodus xxxiii., as we now have it, but in the next
Jehovistic piece (Numbers x. 33) it suddenly appears, and there
must have been some statement in the work as to how it came there.
The tabernacle also appears ready set up in xxxiii. 7, without
any foregoing account of its erection. The institution of the
ark as well as the erection of the tabernacle must have been
narrated between xxxiii. 6 and 7, and then omitted by the present
editor of the Pentateuch from the necessity of paying some regard
to Q, Exodus xxv.; that this is the case many other
considerations also tend to prove. /2/
*****************************************************
2. Without the ark there is no use of the tabernacle, and the
distinction in Exodus xxxiii. which is treated as one of
importance, between the representation (Mal'ak) of Jehovah and
Jehovah Himself, has no meaning. By making an image the Israelites
showed that they could not do without a sensible representation of
the Deity, and Jehovah therefore gave them the ark instead of the calf.
*****************************************************
That the Deuteronomist found JE in a more complete form, before
it was worked up with Q, than that in which we have it after the
working up, is not such a difficult assumption that one should be
driven into utter impossibilities in order to avoid it. For
according to Noldeke either the author of Deuteronomy v.-xi. had
before him the Pentateuch as it now is, and was enabled, very
curiously, to sift out JE from it, or he used JE as an independent
work, but read Q as well, only in such a way that his general view
was in no way influenced by that of the priestly work, but on the
contrary contradicts it entirely and yet unconsciously--since his
work leaves no opening for a ritual legislation given side by side
with the Decalogue, and that ritual legislation is the whole sum
and substance of the Priestly Code. To such a dilemma are we to
make up our minds, because one trait or another of the Deuteronomic
narrative cannot be traced in JE as we now have it, and is preserved
in Q? Does this amount, in the circumstances, to a proof that such
traits were derived from that source? Must not some regard in fairness
be paid to the ensemble of the question ?
We may, further, remember in this connection Vatke's remark, that
the wooden ark in Deuteronomy x. 1, is by no means very similar to
that of Exodus xxv., which, to judge by the analogy of the
golden table and altar, must rather have been called a golden ark.
It takes even more good will to regard the statement about Aaron's
death and burial in Mosera and the induction of Eleazar in his
place (Deuteronomy x. 6, 7) as a reminiscence of Q (Numbers xx. 22
seq.), where Aaron dies and is buried on Mount Hor. In JE also
the priests Aaron and Eleazar stand by the side of Moses and
Joshua (cf. Joshua xxiv. 33). The death and burial of Aaron are
certainly no longer preserved in JE; but we cannot require of the
editor of the Pentateuch that he should make a man die twice, once
according to Q and once according to JE. And it must further be
said that Deuteronomy x. 6, 7 is an interpolation; for the following
verses x. 8 seq., in which not only Aaron and Eleazar, but all
the Levites are in possession of the priesthood, are the
continuation of x. 5, and rest on Exodus xxxii. Here we are still
in Horeb, not in Mosera.
The historical thread which runs through Deuteronomy v. ix. x. may
be traced further in chaps. i.-iv. After their departure from
Horeb the Israelites come straight to Kadesh Barnea, and from this
point, being commanded to invade the hill-land of Judaea, they first
send twelve spies to reconnoitre the country, guided thereto by
their own prudence, but also with the approval of Moses. Caleb is
one of the spies, but not Joshua. After penetrating as far as the
brook Eshcol they return; and though they praise the goodness of
the land, yet the people are so discouraged by their report, that
they murmur and do not venture to advance. Jehovah is angry at
this, and orders them to turn back to the wilderness, where they
are to wander up and down till the old generation is extinct and
a new one grown up. Seized with shame they advance after all,
but are beaten and driven back. Now they retreat to the wilderness,
where for many years they march up and down in the neighbourhood
of Mount Seir, till at length, 38 years after the departure from
Kadesh, they are commanded to advance towards the north, but to
spare the brother-peoples of Moab and Ammon. They conquer the
territory of the Amorite kings, Sihon of Heshbon and Og of
Bashan. Moses assigns it to the tribes of Reuben and Gad and the
half-tribe of Manasseh, on condition that their army is to yield
assistance in the remaining war. The continuous report comes to an
end with the nomination of Joshua as future leader of the people.
This same narrative, with the addition of some scattered
particulars in the Book of Deuteronomy, /1/ will serve perfectly
**************************************
1. Appointment of judges and wardens (#W+RYM = peace-officials,
who, according to xx. 9, are in war replaced by the captains),
i. 9-18, Taberah, Massah, Kibroth Taavah (ix. 22), Dathan and Abiram
(xi. 6), Balaam (xxiii. 5), Baal-peor (iv. 3). Only the
Jehovist narrative of Numbers xii. seems to be nowhere referred to.
In Deuteronomy i. 9-18 the scene is still at Horeb, but this passage
shows acquaintance with Numbers xi. and uses both versions for a
new and somewhat different one.
***************************************
well as a thread to understand JE. What, on the contrary, is
peculiar to the Priestly Code is passed over in deep silence,
and from Exodus xxxiv. Deuteronomy takes us at once to Numbers x.
While not a few of the narratives which Deuteronomy repeats or
alludes to, occur only in JE and not in Q, the converse does not
occur at all. And in those narratives which are found both in JE
and in Q, Deuteronomy follows, in every case in which there is a
distinct divergence, the version of JE. The spies are sent out
from Kadesh, not from the wilderness of Paran; they only reach
Hebron, not the neighbourhood of Hamath; Caleb is one of them, and
not Joshua. The rebels of Numbers xvi. are the Reubenites Dathan
and Abiram, not Korah and the Levites. After the settlement in
the land east of Jordan the people have to do with Moab and Ammon,
not with Midian: Balaam is connected with the former, not with the
latter. The same of Baal-peor: Deuteronomy iv. 3 agrees with JE
(Numbers xxv. 1-5), not with Q (Numbers xxv. 6 seq.). Things being
so, we cannot, with Noldeke, see in the number of the spies (Deuteronomy
i. 23) an unmistakable sign of the influence of Q (Numbers xiii.
2). Had the author read the narrative as it is now before us in
Numbers xiii. xiv., it would be impossible to understand how, as we
have seen, the Jehovist version alone made any impression on him.
He must, accordingly, have known Q as a separate work, but it is a
bold step to argue from such a small particular to the use of a
source which everywhere else is entirely without influence and
unknown, especially as the priority of this source is by no
means established on independent grounds, but is to be proved by
this alleged use of it. lf there were a palpable difference
between JE and Q in this point, if we could say that in Q there
were twelve spies sent out, and in JE; three, the case would be
different; but in Numbers xiii. the beginning of the narrative of
JE has been removed and that of Q put in place of it, so that we
do not know how the narrative of JE began, and what number, if
any, was given in it. In such a state of matters the only
reasonable course is to supply what is lacking in JE from
Deuteronomy, which generally follows the Jehovist alone, and to
conclude that the spies were twelve in number in this source also.
The instance in which the proof would be strongest that Deuteronomy
was acquainted with the narrative of the Priestly Code, is x. 22.
For the seventy souls which make up the whole of Israel at the
immigration into Egypt, are not mentioned in JE, and there is no
gap that we are aware of in the Jehovist tradition at this point.
But they are by no means in conflict with that tradition, and
even should we not take Deuteronomy x. 22 for a proof that the
seventy souls found a place in it also, yet it must at least be
acknowledged, that that passage is by no means sufficient to
break down the evidence that the priestly legislation has the
legislation of Deuteronomy for its starting-point. /1/
********************************************
1. Noldeke frequently argues from such numbers as 12 and 70, as
if they only occurred in Q. But that is not the case. As Q in
the beginning of Genesis has groups of 10, JE has groups of 7;
12 and 40 occur in JE as frequently as in Q, and 70 not less
frequently. It is therefore surprising to find the story of the
12 springs of water and the 70 palm-trees of Elim ascribed to Q
for no other reason than because of the 12 and the 70. Not even
the statements of the age of the patriarchs--except so far as they
serve the chronological system--are a certain mark of Q: compare
Genesis xxxi. 18, xxxvii. 2, xli. 26, l. 26; Deuteronomy xxxiv.
7; Joshua xxiv. 29. Only the names of the 12 spies and the 70
souls are incontestably the property of the Priestly Code, but
it is by no means diflicult to show (especially in Genesis xlvi.
8-27) that they are far less original than the figures. The
numbers are round numbers, and in fact do not admit of such a
recital of the items of which they are made up.
***********************************************
VIII.I.3. As a further objection to Graf's hypothesis, the
Deuteronomistic revision of the Hexateuch is brought into the
field. That revision appears most clearly, it is said, in those
parts which follow the Deuteronomic Torah and point back to it.
It used to be taken for granted that it extends over the Priestly
portions as well as the Jehovistic; but since the occasion arose
to look into this point, it is found that it is not so. The
traces which Noldeke brings together on the point are trifling,
and besides this do not stand the test. He says that the
Deuteronomistic account of the death of Moses (Deuteronomy xxxii. 48
seq., xxxiv. 1 seq.) cannot be regarded as anything else than an
amplification of the account of the main stem (Q), which is
preserved almost in the same words. But Deuteronomy xxxiv. 1b-7
contains nothing of Q and xxxii. 48-52 has not undergone
Deuteronomistic revision. He also refers to Josh. ix. 27:
"Joshua made the Gibeonites at that day hewers of wood and drawers
of water for the congregation and for the altar of Jehovah even
unto this day, in the place which He should choose."
The second part of this sentence, he says, is a Deuteronomistic
addition to the first, which belongs to the Priestly narrative.
But Noldeke himself acknowledges that the Deuteronomistically-revised
verses ix. 22 seq. are not the continuation of the priestly version
15c, 17-21, but of the Jehovistic version 15ab, 16; and between
verse 16 and verse 22 there is nothing wanting but the
circumstance referred to in verse 26. The phrase _hewer of wood
and drawer of water_ is not enough to warrant us to separate verse
27 from 22-26; the phrase occurs not only in verse 21 but also
in JE verse 23. The words FOR THE CONGREGATION do certainly
point to the Priestly Code, but are balanced by the words which
follow, FOR THE ALTAR OF JEHOVAH, which is according to the
Jehovistic view. The original statement is undoubtedly that the
Gibeonites are assigned to the altar or the house of Jehovah. But
according to Ezekiel xliv. the hierodulic services in the temple
were not to be undertaken by foreigners, but by Levites; hence
in the Priestly Code the servants of the altar appear as servants
of the congregation. From this it results that LMZBX is to be
preferred in verse 27 to L(DH W, the latter being a later
correction. As such it affords a proof that the last revision of
the Hexateuch proceeded from the Priestly Code, and not from Deuteronomy.
As for Joshua xviii. 3-10, where Noldeke sees in the account of the
division of the land another instance of Deuteronomistic addition,
I have already indicated my opinion, . The piece is
Jehovistic, and if the view were to be found in the Priestly Code
at all, that Joshua first allotted their territory to Judah and Ephraim,
and then, a good while after, to the other seven tribes, that source
must have derived such a view from JE, where alone it has its roots. /1/
********************************************
1. Jahrbb. fur Deutsche Theol., 1876, p. 596 seq.
********************************************
And lastly, Noldeke considers Josh. xxii. to speak quite decidedly
for his view; but in the narrative of the Priestly Code, xxii. 9-34,
to which the verses l-8 do not belong, there is no sign of
Deuteronomistic revision to be found. /2/
**********************************************
2. Joh. Hollenberg in Stud. und Krit., 1874, p. 462 seq.
**********************************************
There is a more serious difficulty only in the case of the short
chapter, Josh. xx., of which the kernel belongs to the Priestly
Code, though it contains all sorts of additions which savour
strongly of the Deuteronomistic revision. Kayser declares these
awkward accretions to be glosses of quite a late period. This may
seem to be pure tendency-criticism; but it is reinforced by the
confirmation of the Septuagint, which did not find any of those
alleged Deuteronomistic additions where they now are. /3/
************************************************
3. Aug. Kayser, Das vorexilische Buch der Urgeschichtc Israels
(Strassburg, 1874), p. 147, seq.; Joh. Hollenberg, der
Charactcr der Alex. Uebersetzung des B. Josua (Programm des
Gymn. zu Moers, 1876), p. 15.
**************************************************
But were it the case that some probable traces of Deuteronomistic
revision were actually to be found in the Priestly Code, we must
still ask for an explanation of the disproportionately greater
frequency of such traces in JE. Why, for example, are there none
of them in the mass of laws of the middle books of the Hexateuch?
This is undoubtedly and everywhere the fact, and this must
dispose us a priori to attach less weight to isolated instances to
the contrary: the more so, as Joshua xx. shows that the later
retouchings of the canonical text often imitate the tone of the
Deuteronomist.
IX.II.
IX.II.1. I have said that in the L)DH W of Josh. ix. 27, we have
the addition of a final priestly revision. Such a revision must be
assumed to have taken place, if the Priestly Code is younger than
Deuteronomy. But the assumption of its existence does not depend
on deduction merely: Kuenen argued for it inductively, even
before he became a supporter of Graf's hypothesis. /1/
**********************************************
1. Historisch-Kritisch Onderzoek I. (Leyden, 1861), p. 165; the
reviser of the Pentateuch must be sought in the same circles in
which the Book of Origins (Q) arose and was gradually extended
and modified, i.e., among the priests of Jerusalem, p. 194; it is
generally thought that the Deuteronomist is the reviser of the
whole Book of Joshua, but his hand is not to be traced
everywhere,--not, for example, in the priestly sections; the last
reviser is to be distinguished from the Deuteronomist. In
certain narratives of Numbers and Joshua, Kuenen detected very
considerable additions by the last reviser, and the results of
his investigation have now been published in the first part of the
second edition of his great isagogic work (Leyden, 1885).
***********************************************
This may be best demonstrated by examining the chapters Leviticus
xvii.-xxvi. At present they are incorporated in the Priestly
Code, having undergone a revision with that view, which in some
places adds little, in others a good deal. Viewed, however, as
they originally were, they form a work of a peculiar character
by themselves, a work pervaded by a somewhat affected religious
hortatory tone, which harmonises but little with the Priestly
Code. The author worked largely from earlier authorities, which
explains, for example, how chapter xviii. and chapter xx. both
find a place in his production. Leviticus xvii.-xxvi is incomparably
instructive for the knowledge it affords of literary relationships:
it is a perfect compendium of the literary history of the Pentateuch. /2/
*********************************************
2. Compare Jahrbb. fur Deutsche Theol., 1877, p. 422-444,
especially on the elimination of the additions of the reviser.
In the present discussion I shall not take these into account.
In chapter xxiii., for example, I only take account of verses
9-22, 39-44, in chapter xxiv. only of vers. 15-22
***********************************************
As with Deuteronomy, so with this legislation; it is clear that
it goes back to the Jehovistic legislation of Sinai (Exodus
xx.-xxiii.) as its source. It also bears to have been given on
Mount Sinai (xxv. 1, xxvi. 46). It is addressed to the people,
and is popular in its contents, which are chiefly of a civic and
moral character. It is meant only for the promised land and for
settled life, not for the wilderness as well. The festivals are
three in number, and have not quite parted with their character
as feasts of harvest. Among the sacrifices the sin-offering and
the trespass-offering are wanting. The legislation does deal with
the cultus to a disproportionate extent, but the directions about
it do not go into technical details, and are always addressed to
the people. Even in those directions which concern the priests
the people are addressed, and the priests are spoken of in the
third person. Nor are palpable points of contact wanting. Leviticus
xix. 2-8, 9-18, may be regarded as counterparts of the first and
second tables of the decalogue. The precept, "Thou shalt not
respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty,"
xix. 15, is a development of that in Exodus xxiii. 3, and a number
of other precepts in Leviticus xix. could stand with equal
appropriateness in Exodus xxii. 17 seq. The directions in Leviticus
xxii. 27-29 are similar to those of Exodus xxii. 29, xxiii. 18, 19.
In the same way those of Leviticus xxiv. 15-22 are based both in
contents and form on Exodus xxi. 12. /1/
********************************************
1. Compare xxiv. 15 seq. with Exodus xxii. 27 (xxi. 17); xxiv.
18 with Exodus xxi. 28 seq.; xxiv. 19, 20 with Exodus xxi. 33,
34; xxiv. 21 with Exodus xxi. 28 seq.
*********************************************
In xxiv. 22 we notice a polemical reference to Exodus xxi. 20
seq., 26 seq. In xxv. 1-7 the whole of the expressions of Exodus
xxiii. 10, 11 are repeated. In xx. 24, we have the Jehovistic
phrase, "a land flowing with milk and honey."
Yet Leviticus xvii.-xxvi. only takes its starting-point from the
Jehovistic legislation, and modifies it very considerably,
somewhat in the manner of Deuteronomy. There is a demonstrable
affinity with Deuteronomy both in the ideas and in the
expressions. Common to both is the care for the poor and the
undefended: to both humanity is a main object of legislation.
"If a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex
him; he shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt
love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt"
(xix. 34).
Leviticus xvii. seq. attaches great importance to unity of worship.
It is still a demand, not a presupposition (xvii. 8 seq., xix. 30,
xxvi. 2); the motive of it is to guard against heathen influences
and to secure the establishment of a monotheism without images. /2/
******************************************
2. xvii. 7 (cf. 2Chronicles xi. 15), xviii. 21, xix. 4, 19, 26,
29, 31, xx. 2 seq. 6, xxvi. 1, 30. With regard to the date we
have to note the stern prohibition of the service of Moloch. On
Lev, xvii. see above, p. 376.
******************************************
This is quite recognisable, and forms an important point of
contact with Deuteronomy. The same contact may be observed in
the prohibition of certain observances of mourning (xix. 27 seq.),
the calculation of Pentecost from the beginning of barley harvest
(xxiii. 15), the seven days' duration of the feast of tabernacles,
and the cheerful sacrificial feasts which are to accompany its
observance. Add to this a similarity by no means slight in the
colour of the language, e.g., in xviii. 1-5, 24-30, xix. 33-37,
xx. 22 seq., xxv. 35 seq. Some of the phrases may be mentioned.
"When ye are come into the land that I shall give you." "Ye shall
rejoice before Jehovah." "I am Jehovah that brought you up out
of the land of Egypt." "Ye shall keep my commandments and statutes
and laws, to do them."
But the legislation we have here is further advanced than
Deuteronomy. In the festivals the joint sacrifice of the
congregation is already prominent (xxiii. 9-22). The priests
are not the Levites, but the sons and brothers of Aaron, their
income has grown materially, their separate holiness has reached a
higher point. Stricter demands are also made on the laity for
personal holiness, especially as regards continence from the sins
of the flesh, and the marriage of relatives (Leviticus xviii. xx.).
Marriage with an uncle's wife is forbidden (xviii. 14, xx. 20),
whereas in Deuteronomy it is still legal. The work dates from a
time when exile was a familiar idea: xviii. 26 seq.:
"Ye shall keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit
any of those abominations; for the men that were in the land before
you did these things, and the land vomited them out. Take care
that the land spue not you out also as it spued out the nations
that were before you."
Similarly xx. 23 seq.: and in a legislative work such utterances
prove more than they would in a prophecy. Now as our section
departs from Deuteronomy, it approaches to Ezekiel. This is its
closest relationship, and that to which attention has been most
drawn. It appears in the peculiar fusion of cultus and morality,
in the notion of holiness, in a somewhat materialistic sense, as
the great requirement of religion, and in the fact that the demand
of holiness is made to rest on the residence of the people near
the sanctuary and in the holy land. /1/
******************************************
1. On Leviticus xxii. 24, 25, compare Kuenen's Hibbert Lectures.
******************************************
But the affinity is still more striking in the language: many
unusual phrases, and even whole sentences, from Ezekiel, are
repeated in Leviticus xvii. seq. /2/
*******************************************
2. Compare Colenso, Pentateuch and Joshua, vi. p. 3-23. Kayser,
op. cit. p. 177- 179. Smend on Ezekiel, p. xxv.
********************************************
The 10th of the 7th month is in Leviticus xxv. 9 as in Ezekiel,
new-year's day, not, as in the Priestly Code, the great day of
atonement. This led Graf to regard Ezekiel himself as the author
of this collection of laws in Leviticus; and Colenso and Kayser
followed him. But this is out of the question; notwithstanding
the numerous points of contact both in linguistic and material
respects, the agreement is by no means complete. Ezekiel knows
no seed of Aaron, and no wine at the sacrifices (Leviticus xxiii.
13); his festival legislation shows considerable differences,
and in spirit is more akin to the Priestly Code. And if he were
the author he would have said something about the proper place
in the cultus of the Levites and of the prince.
The corpus in question, which Klostermann called, not
inappropriately, the Law of Holiness, inclines from Ezekiel
towards the Priestly Code: in such pieces as xvii. xxi. xxii.
it takes some closeness of attention to see the differences from
the latter, though in fact they are not inconsiderable. It stands
between the two, somewhat nearer, no doubt, to Ezekiel. How are
we to regard this fact? Jehovist, Deuteronomy, Ezekiel, are a
historical series; Ezekiel, Law of Holiness, Priestly Code, must
also be taken as historical steps, and this in such a way as to
explain at the same time the dependence of the Law of Holiness on
the Jehovist and on Deuteronomy. To assume that Ezekiel, having
the Pentateuch in all other respects as we have it, had a great
liking for this piece of it, and made it his model in the
foundation of his style of thought and expression--such an
assumption does not free us from the necessity of seeking the
historical order, and of assigning his natural place in that order
to Ezekiel; we cannot argue on such a mere chance. Now the
question is not a complicated one, whether in the Law of Holiness
we are passing from the Priestly Code to Ezekiel or from Ezekiel
to the Priestly Code. The Law of Holiness underwent a last
revision, which represents, not the views of Ezekiel, but those of
the Priestly Code, and by means of which it is incorporated in
that code. This revision has not been equally incisive in all
parts. Some of its corrections and supplements are very
considerable, e.g., xxiii. 1-8, 23-38; xxiv. 1-14, 23. Some
of them are quite unimportant, e.g., the importation of the Ohel
Moed (instead of the Mikdash or the Mishkan), xvii. 4, 6, 9, xix.
21 seq.; the trespass-offering, xix. 21 seq.; the Kodesh
Kodashim, xxi. 22. Only in xxv. 8 seq. is the elimination of
the additions difficult. But the fact that the last edition of
the Law of Holiness proceeds from the Priestly Code, is
universally acknowledged. Its importance for the literary history
of Israel cannot be over-estimated. /1/
*************************************************
1. L. Horst, in his discussion on Leviticus XVii,-XXYi, and Ezekiel
(Colmar, 1881), has strikingly shown that the mechanical style of
criticism in which Dillmann even surpasses his predecessor Knobel,
is not equal to the problem presented by the Law of Holiness. He
goes on, however, to an attempt to save, by modifying it, the old
Strassburg view of Ezekiel's authorship; and as Kuenen justly
remarks, he makes ship-wreck on Leviticus xxvi. (Theol. Tijdschr.
1882, p. 646). Cf. .
**************************************************
IX.II.2. The concluding oration, Leviticus xxvi. 3-46, calls for
special consideration. Earlier scholars silently assumed that this
piece belonged to Leviticus xvii. 1-XXVI. 2; but many critics,
Noldeke for example, now regard it as an interpolation in Leviticus
of a piece which from its character should be elsewhere. At any rate
the oration is composed with special reference to what precedes it.
If it is not taken as a peroration, such as Exodus xxiii. 30-33,
Deuteronomy xxviii., its position in such a part of the Priestly Code
is quite incomprehensible. It has, moreover, a palpable
connection with the laws in xvii.-xxv. The _land_, and _agriculture_,
have here the same significance for religion as in chaps. xix.
xxiii. xxv.; the threat of vomiting out (xviii. 25 seq., xx.
22) is repeated here more circumstantially; the only statute
actually named is that of the fallow of the seventh year (xxvi.
34, xxv. 1-7). The piece begins with the expression, which is so
characteristic of the author of chapter xvii. seq. "If ye walk
in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them," and the
same phrase recurs, with slight alteration, in vers. 15 and 43.
The conclusion, verse 46, is, "These are the statutes and
judgments and laws which Jehovah gave, to regulate the relation
between Him and Israel on Mount Sinai, by Moses." This is
obviously the subscription of a preceding corpus of statutes and
judgments, such as we have in, xvii. 1-xxvi. 2. Mount Sinai is
mentioned also in xxv. 1 as the place of revelation.
If Leviticus xxvi. is incontestably intended to form the conclusion
of chaps. xvii.-xxv., it would be natural to suppose that the
author of that collection was also the author of the oration.
Noldeke thinks, however, that the language differs too much from
that of xvii.-xxv. Yet he is obliged to acknowledge several
resemblances, and these not unimportant; while some of the
differences which he adduces (Bamoth, Gillulim, Hammanim, xxvi.
30) are really examples of similarity. Rare and original words
may be found in the preceding chapters also. It may be that in
chapter xxvi they are more frequent in proportion: yet this does
not entitle us to say that the language generally is very original.
On the contrary, it is everywhere characterised by borrowed
expressions. So much of linguistic difference as actually remains
is sufficiently accounted for by the difference of subject: first
come laws in a dry matter-of-fact style, then prophecy in a
poetical pathetic style. The idiosyncrasy of the writer has no
scope in the former case, from the nature of the materials, some
of which had already assumed their form before he made use of them.
In the latter case he can express himself freely; and it is fair
that this should not be overlooked.
The arguments brought forward by Noldeke against the probability
that Leviticus xxvi. belongs to chaps. xvii.-xxv. and is not merely
tacked on to them, disappear completely on a closer comparison of
the literary character of the two pieces. Chapter xxvi. reminds
us most strongly of Ezekiel's style, both in thought and
language. The most significant passage is Leviticus xxvi. 39.
The threat has been uttered that Israel is to be destroyed as a
people, and that the remnant which escapes the destroying sword
of the enemy is to be carried into exile, to sink under the weight
of past calamity and present affliction. Then the speech goes
on: "And they that are left of you shall _pine away_ in their
iniquity in your enemies' land; and also in the iniquities of
their fathers shall they _pine away_. Then they will confess
their own sin and the sin of their fathers." In Ezekiel, this
confession actually occurs in the mouth of one of his
fellow-exiles: they say (xxxiii. 10), "Our transgressions
and our sins are heavy upon us, and we _pine away_ in them, and
cannot live." In the same strain the prophet says (xxiv. 23)
that in his dull sorrow for the death of his wife he will be an
emblem of the people: "ye shall not mourn nor weep, but ye shall
_pine away_ in your iniquities."
Nor are the other traits wanting in the oration which, as we say,
accompanied the Ezekielic colouring of the preceding chapters.
We do not expect to find traces of the influence of the Jehovist
legislation (further than that Exodus xxiii. 20 seq. formed the
model both for Deuteronomy xxviii. and Leviticus xxvi.); but to
make up for this we find very distinct marks of the influence of
the prophets, the older prophets too, as Amos (verse 31). We can
as little conceive the existence of the Book of Ezekiel as of this
chapter without the prophetic literature having preceded it and
laid the foundation for it.
As for the relation to Deuteronomy, the resemblance of Leviticus xxvi.
to Deuteronomy xxviii. is very great, in the arrangement as well as in
the ideas. True, there are not many verbal coincidences, but the
few which do occur are important. The expressions of xxvi. 16
occur nowhere in the Old Testament but in Deuteronomy xxviii. 22, 65:
similarly R)#YM with the meaning it has in verse 45 only occurs
in Deuteronomy xix. 14 and in the later literature (Isaiah lxi. 6).
The metaphor of the uncircumcised heart (verse 41) only occurs in
one other passage in the law, in Deuteronomy; the other instances
of it are in prophecy, of contemporary or later date (Jeremiah iv.
4, ix. 24, 25, Ezekiel xliv. 7, 9). There are several more
reminiscences of Jeremiah, most of them, however, not very
distinct. We may remark on the relation between Jeremiah xvi. 18
in one respect to verse 30, and in another to verse 18 of our
chapter. Here the sin is punished sevenfold, in Jeremiah double.
The same is said in Isaiah xl. 2, lx. 7; and our chapter has
also in common with this prophet the remarkable use of rtc,h (with
sin or trespass as object). Did not the chapter stand in
Leviticus, it would, doubtless, be held to be a reproduction, some
small part of it of the older prophecies, the most of it of those
of Jeremiah and Ezekiel: Leviticus xxvi. 34 is actually quoted in
2Chronicles xxxvi 22 as a word of the prophet Jeremiah.
Leviticus xxvi. has points of contact, finally, with the Priestly
Code, in PRH WRBH, HQYM BRYT, HTWDH, )NY, (never )NKY), in the
excessive use of the accusative participle and avoidance of verbal
suffixes, and in its preferring the colourless NTN to verbs of
more special meaning.
The only reason for the attempt to separate Leviticus xxvi. from
xvii.-xxv. lies in the fact, that the exilic or post-exilic origin
of this hortatory and denunciatory oration is too plain to be
mistaken. To us, this circumstance can only prove that it belongs
to xvii.-xxv., providing a weighty confirmation of the opinion we
have already formed on other grounds as to the period which produced
these laws.
"If ye will not for all this hearken unto me, but walk contrary to me,
then I will also walk contrary to you in fury; and I will chastise you
seven times for your sins. Ye shall eat the flesh of your sons
and daughters, and I will destroy your high places, and cast down
your sun-pillars' and cast your carcasses upon the carcasses of
your idols, and my soul shall abhor you. And I will make your
cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries into desolation, and I
will not smell the savour of your sweet odours. And I will bring
the land into desolation, and your enemies who settle therein
shall be astonished at it; and I will scatter you among the peoples,
and will draw out the sword after you, and your land shall be
desolate and your cities ruins. Then shall the land pay her
sabbaths all the years of the desolation when you are in your
enemies' land: even then shall the land rest and pay her
sabbaths. As long as it lieth desolate it shall make up the
celebration of the sabbaths which it did not celebrate as long as
you dwelt in it. And upon them that are left alive of you I will
send a faintness into their hearts in the land of their enemies,
and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them, and they shall
flee as fleeing from a sword, and they shall fall when none
pursueth. And they shall fall one upon another as it were before
a sword when none pursueth, and there shall be no stopping in the
flight before your enemies. And ye shall lose yourselves among
the peoples, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up. And
they that are left of you shall pine away in their iniquity in
your enemies' lands, and also in the iniquities of their fathers
shall they pine away. And they shall confess their iniquity
and the iniquity of their fathers in regard to their
unfaithfulness which they committed against me, and that because
they have walked contrary to me, I also walk contrary to them,
and bring them into the land of their enemies. Then their
uncircumcised heart is humbled, and then they pay their penalty,
and I remember my covenant with Jacob, and also my covenant with
Isaac, and also my covenant with Abraham, and I remember the land.
The land also, left by them, pays its sabbaths, while she lieth
without inhabitant and waste, and they themselves pay the penalty
of their iniquity because, even because, they despised my judgments,
and their soul abhorred my statutes. And yet for all that, when
they be in the land of their enemies, I have not rejected them,
neither have I abhorred them to destroy them utterly, and to break
my covenant with them: for I am Jehovah their God. And I will for
their sakes remember the covenant of their ancestors whom I brought
forth out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the peoples, that
I might be their God: I am Jehovah" (xxvi. 27-45).
These words undoubtedly cannot have been written before the
Babylonian exile. It is said that the Assyrian exile will explain
the passage: but where is there any similarity between the
oration before us and the old genuine Isaiah? In Ezekiel's day
such thoughts, feelings, and expressions as we have here can be
shown to have prevailed: but it would be difficult to show that
the fall of Samaria gave rise to such depression at Jerusalem:
and Leviticus xxvi. was not written outside Jerusalem, for it
presupposes unity of worship. The _Jews_ are addressed here, as
in Deuteronomy xxix., xxx., and they had no such lively feeling
of solidarity with the deported Israelites as to think of them
in connection with such threats. I even think it certain that
the writer lived either towards the end of the Babylonian exile
or after it, since at the close of the oration he turns his eyes
to the restoration. In such prophets as Jeremiah and Ezekiel
there is a meaning in such forecasting of the joyful future but
here it contradicts both the historical position and the object
of the threats, and appears to be explained most naturally as
the result of an accident, i.e., of actuality. That in a
comparison of Leviticus xxvi. with Jeremiah and Ezekiel, the
former cannot claim priority, appears distinctly from the
comparative use of the phrase _uncircumised heart_. That phrase
originates in Jeremiah (iv. 4, ix. 24 seq.), but in Leviticus
xxvi. it is used as a well-known set term. In the same way the
phrase _pine away in their iniquity_ is repeated by Ezekiel as he
heard it in the mouth of the people. He is its originator in
literature; in Leviticus xxvi. it is borrowed. /1/
***********************************************
1. Horst tries to find a place for Leviticus xxvi. in the last
years of king Zedekiah (op. cit. p. 65, 66), but in this he is
merely working out his theory that the author was the youthful
Ezekiel; and the theory is sufficiently condemned if it leads
to this consequence. Delitzsch (Zeitschr. fur Kirchl. Wissench.
1880, p. 619) thinks it a piece of impertinence in me to read out
of Ezekiel xxxiii. what that passage says. On Deuteronomy x. 16,
xxx. 6, and generally on the color Hieremianus in Deuteronomy, see
Jahrb. fur D. Thhcol., 1877, p. 464.
**********************************************
The criticism of Leviticus xvii. seq. Ieads us to the result, that
a collection of laws which took form during the period of the exile
was received into the Priestly Code, and there clothed with fresh
life. We need not then tremble at Schrader's threatening us with
"critical analysis," and Graf's hypothesis will not be thereby
overturned.
IX.II.3. Two or three further important traces of the final priestly
revision of the Hexateuch may here find mention. In the story
of the flood the verses vii. 6-9 are an editorial addition, with
the object of removing a contradiction between JE and Q; it
shares the ideas and speaks the language of the Priestly Code.
In the title of Deuteronomy the verse, "It came to pass in the
fortieth year, in the eleventh [(#TY] month, on the first day of
the month, that Moses spake unto the children of Israel according
to all that Jehovah had given him in commandment unto them" (i. 3)
is shown by the most undoubted signs to belong to the Priestly Code,
and is intended to incorporate Deuteronomy in that work. We have
already shown that the Priestly Code in the Book of Joshua is simply
a filling-up of the Jehovistic-Deuteronomistic narrative.
That the Priestly Code consists of elements of two kinds, first of
an independent stem, the Book of the Four Covenants (Q), and
second, of innumerable additions and supplements which attach
themselves principally to the Book of the Four Covenants, but not
to it alone, and indeed to the whole of the Hexateuch--this
assertion has not, strange to say, met with the opposition which
might have been expected. Ryssel has even seen in the twofold
nature of the Priestly Code a means to maintain the position of
the Book of the Four Covenants before the exile: he sacrifices
the additions, and places the necessary interval between them and
the main body of the work. He thinks the close affinity between
the two parts is sufficiently explained by the supposition that
they both issued from the same circle, that of the priesthood of
Jerusalem. Were it the case that the temple of Jerusalem was as
autonomous and as solely legitimate in the days of Solomon as in
those of the foreign domination, that the priests had as much to
say under Ahaz, Hezekiah, and Josiah as after the exile, if it
were allowable to represent them according as it suits one's views,
and not according to the historical evidence, if, in short, there
were no Israelite history at all, such an explanation might be
allowed to stand. The secondary part of the Priestly Code of
necessity draws the primary part with it. The similarity in
matter and in form, the perfect agreement in tendencies and ideas,
in expressions and ways of putting things, all compel us to think
that the whole, if not a literary, is yet a historical, unity.
IX.III.
It has lately been the fashion to regard the language of
the Priestly Code as an insuperable barrier to the destructive
efforts of tendency criticism. But it is unfortunate that this veto
of language is left as destitute of detailed proof, by Delitzsch,
Riehm, and Dillmann, as the veto of critical analysis by Schrader;
and we cannot be called upon to show proof against a contention
which is unsupported by evidence. But I take advantage of the
opportunity to communicate some detached observations, which I
may perhaps remark did not occur to me in connection with the
investigation of the Pentateuch, but on a quite different occasion.
In the passage 2Samuel vi. 12 I was exceedingly struck with L(MT,
and not less with BR) in the two passages Isaiah iv. 5, Amos iv. 13,
and while following out the distribution of these two words I came
on the traces of similar phenomena.
The language of the pre-exilic historical books is in general much
akin to that of the Jehovistic work; that of the Priestly Code,
on the contrary, is quite different. It is common enough to
interpret this fact, as if the latter belonged to an earlier
period. But not to mention that in that case the Code must have
been entirely without influence on the history of the language,
it agrees ill with this view, that on going back to the oldest
documents preserved to us of the historical literature of the
Hebrews we find the difference increasing rather than diminishing.
Take Judges v. and 2Samuel i.; the poetical pieces in JE may be
compared with them, but in Q there is nothing like them. And on
the other hand, it is in the narratives which were introduced very
late into the history, such as Judges xix.-xxi.; 1Samuel vii.
viii. x. 17 seq. xii.; 1Kings xiii., and the apocryphal
additions in 1Kings vi.-viii. that we recognise most readily
some linguistic approximation to the Priestly Code. And as in the
historical so also in the prophetical literature. The speech of
Amos, Isaiah, Micah, answers on the whole to that of the Jehovist,
not to that of the priestly author.
Deuteronomy and the Book of Jeremiah first agree with the Priestly
Code in certain important expressions. In Ezekiel such expressions
are much more numerous, and the agreement is by no means with
Leviticus xvii.-xxvi. alone. /1/
******************************************
I Especially noticeable is P)T NGB TYMNH in Ezekiel and the
Priestly Code. In the latter Negeb, even when it refers to the
actual Negeb, yet is used as denoting south (Numbers xxxiv. 3,
xxv. 2-4), i.e., it has completely lost its original meaning.
******************************************
In the subsequent post-exilic prophets down to Malachi the points
of contact are limited to details, but do not cease to occur; they
occur also in the Psalms and in Ecclesiastes. Reminiscences of the
Priestly Code are found nowhere but in the Chronicles and some of
the Psalms. For that Amos iv. 11 is borrowed from Genesis xix. 29
is not a whit more clear than that the original of Amos i. 2 must
be sought in Joel iv. 19 [iii. 16].
The Priestly Code maintains its isolated literary character as
against the later literature also. This is the result partly of
the use of a number of technical terms, partly of the incessant
repetition of the same formulae, and of its great poverty of
language. But if we neglect what is due to the stiff and hard
idiosyncrasy of the author, it is undoubtedly the case that he
makes use of a whole series of characteristic expressions which
are not found before the exile, but gradually emerge and come
into use after it. The fact is not even denied, it is merely
put aside. To show what weight is due to it we may find room
here for a short statement of the interesting points for the
history of language to be found in Genesis i.
Genesis i. 1, R)#YT means in the older Hebrew, not the COMMENCEMENT
of a process which goes forward in time, but the FIRST
(and generally the BEST) part of a thing. In the sense of a
beginning in time, as the contrary to )XRYT, it is first found in
a passage of Deuteronomy, xi. 12; then in the titles in the Book
of Jeremiah, xxvi. 1, xxvii. 1, xxviii. 1, xlix. 34, and in Isaiah
xlvi. 10, and lastly in the Hagiographa, Job viii. 7, xili. 12;
Proverbs xvii. 14; Ecclesiastes vii. 8. In Genesis x. 10
R)#YT MMLKTW has a different meaning from that in Jeremiah xxvi. 1
in the one it is the principal part of the kingdom; in the other
it is the beginning of the reign. _In the beginning_ was in the
early time, if absolute, BFR)#NH, BATTXLH; if relative, BTXLT
TXLT. /1/
*******************************************
1 The vocalisation B:R#YT is very curious: we should expect
BFRA$YT. It has been attempted to do justice to it by translating:
"In the beginning, when God created heaven and earth--but the earth
was without form and void, and darkness lay upon the deep, and the
spirit of God brooded over the water--then God spake: Let there be
light."
But this translation is desperate, and certainly not that followed
by the punctuators, for the Jewish tradition (Septuagint, Aquila,
Onkelos) is unanimous in translating:
"In the beginning God created heaven and earth."
In Aramaic, on the contrary, such adverbs take, as is well known,
the form of the _status constructus_. Cf. RBT Psalm lxvv. 10, cxx. 6.
********************************************
We have already spoken of the word
BR), a word remarkable for its specific theological import. Apart
from Amos iv. 13 and Isaiah iv. 5 it is first found outside the
Priestly Code in the Deuteronomist in Exodus xxxiv. 10, Numbers xvi.
30 (?), Deuteronomy iv. 32, and in the Book of Jeremiah, xxxi. 22:
then in Ezekiel xxi. 35, xxviii. 13, 15; Malachi ii. 10; in Psalms
li. 12, lxxxix. 13, 48, cii. 19, civ. 30, cxlviii. 5; Ecclesiastes
xii. 1. It occurs, however, most frequently, 20 times in fact,
in Isaiah xl.-lxvi.; and curiously enough, never in Job, where we
should expect to find it. It has nothing to do with B"R") (cut down
wood) and BRY) (fat). /2/
*********************************************
2. I do not speak of the use of _Elohim_ and the application of
the names of God in the Priestly Code: the matter is not yet clear
to me. Very curious is H#M, Leviticus xxiv. 11.
********************************************
Genesis i. 2, THW WBHW occurs also in Jeremiah iv. 23; Isaiah xxxiv.
11. THW alone is not so rare, but it also occurs, Isaiah xxix. 21
excepted, only in the later literature Deuteronomy xxxii. 10; 1Samuel
xii. 21; Isaiah xxiv. 10, xl. 17, 23, xli. 29, xliv. 9, xlv.
18 seq., xlix. 4, lix. 4; Job vi. 18, xii.24, xxvi. 7; Psalm
cvii. 40. The verb RXP (brood), which is common in Aramaic, only
recurs in a single passage in the Old Testament, and that a late
one, Deuteronomy xxxii. 11. Yet the possibility must be conceded
that there was no occasion for its more frequent employment.
Genesis i. 4, HBDYL and NBDL (divide and divide one's self), common
in the Priestly Code, is first used by Deuteronomy and the
Deuteronomist (Deuteronomy iv. 41, x.8, xix. 7, xxix. 10; 1Kings
viii. 53), then by Ezekiel (xxii. 26, xxxix. 14, xlii. 10) and
the author of Isaiah xl. seq. (lvi. 3, lix. 2). It is most used by
the writer of Chronicles, (1Chronicles xii. 8, xxiii. 13, xxv. 1;
2Chronicles xxv. 10; Ezra vi. 21, viii.24, ix. 1, x. 8, 11, 16 ;
Nehemiah x. 2, 29, xiii. 3). On YWM )XD Genesis i. 5 compare
Josephus, Antiquities I. i. 1: "That now would be the FIRST day,
but Moses says ONE day; I could give the reason of this here, but
as I have promised (in the Introduction) to give such reasons for
everything in a separate work, I shall defer the exposition till
then." The Rabbis also, in Genesis Rabba, feel the difficulty of
the expression, which, however, has its parallel in the )XD LXD#,
which belongs to the later way of speaking. In Syriac the
ordinary expression is XD B#B); hence in the New Testament MIA
SABBATWN for the first day of the week.
Genesis i. 6, RQY( (firmament) is found, outside the Priestly
Code, only in Ezekiel (i. 22-26, x. 1), and in still later
writers ; Psalms xix. 2, cl. 1 ; Daniel xii. 3; cf. Job
xxxviii. 18. /1/
*********************************************
1. It does not mean, as is generally assumed, that which is
beaten out thin, is stretched out. For, firstly, the heaven is
never considered to be made of sheet-metal; secondly, the meaning
in question only belongs to the Piel, and the substantive derived
from it is RIQQUA(. The Kal, with which RQY( must be connected,
is found in Isaiah xiii. 5, xliv. 24; Psalms cxxxvi. 6. It is
generally translated _spread out_, but quite unwarrantably.
Parallel with it are YSD and KWNN (compare Psalms xxiv. 2 with cxxxvi.
6); the Septuagint translates in all three passages with stereoun,
and accordingly renders RQY( with STEREWMA (firmamentum). This
rendering, which alone is supported by tradition, and which is very
satisfactory, is confirmed by the Syriac, where the verb RQ( is
frequent in the sense of _fortify_.
*********************************************
Genesis i. 10 YMYM (the sea, singular, see i. 22; Leviticus xi. 9,
10), is rare in older times, and belongs to lofty poetical
language; it is, on the contrary, frequent in Ezekiel (ten
times), and in the Psalms (seven times); and occurs besides in Job
vi. 3; Nehemiah ix. 6 ; Jonah ii. 4 ; Daniel xi. 45. Genesis i. 11
MYN (kind), a very peculiar word, especially in the form _Jeminehu_,
is found outside of this chapter and Leviticus xiv., Genesis vi. 20,
vii. 14, only in Deuteronomy xiv. and Ezekiel xlvii. 10.
Genesis i. 26, DMWT (likeness, verses 1, 3) does not occur in the
earlier literature. It first appears in 2Kings xvi. 10, in a
post-Deuteronomic passage, for the writer is that of chapter xi.
seq., xxi. seq. Then in Ezekiel (15 times), Isaiah xiii. 4, xl.
18; 2Chronicles iv. 3; Psalms lxviii. 5. It is a borrowed word
from Aramaic; and the corresponding verb only came into use in
the period when Aramaic began to find its way in.
Genesis i. 27 ZFKFR (male) is in earlier times ZFKW.R; for
this is the vocalization in Exodus xxiii. 17, xxxiv. 23; Deuteronomy
xvi. 16, xx. 13; and if it is right in these passages, as we cannot
doubt it is, it must be introduced in Exodus xxxiv. 19; Deuteronomy
xv. 19; 1Kings xi. 15 seq. as well. In the Priestly Code ZFKFR
occurs with great frequency, and elsewhere only in the later
literature, Deuteronomy iv. 16; Jeremiah xx. 15, xxx. 6; Ezekiel xvi.
17; Isaiah lxvi. 7; Malachi i. 14; Judges xxi. 11, 12; 2Chronicles
xxxi. 16; Ezra viii. As for NQBH (female), matters are even worse.
Outside the Priestly Code it is only found in Jeremiah (xxxi. 22)
and the Deuteronomist (iv. 16). The Jehovist, it is well known,
always says )Y#, W)Y#H even of the lower animals: the editor of
the Hexateuch, on the contrary, always follows the usage of the
Priestly Code.
Genesis i. 28 XYH HRM#T attracts attention by the omission of the
article with the substantive and its being merely prefixed to the
following adjective; as if one should say in Greek, )ANHR (O
)AGATHOS instead of (O )ANER (O )AGATHOS. In the same way i. 21
YWM H##Y, and ii. 3 YWM H#BY(Y. In Arabic there are some
analogies for this, but on seeking one in Hebrew we have to come
down to the period when it was usual to say KNST HGDWLH. KB#
and RDH are Aramaisms. In KBSHWH we find the only verbal suffix
in Genesis i. Instead we have always the forms )TM )TW; this is
so in the Priestly Code generally. In the Jehovistic main work,
in J, these substitutes with )T are only used sometimes and for
special reasons: it may be generally asserted that they are
more used the later we come down. Parallel with this is the use
of )nky in J and )ny in the Priestly Code; the latter form
grows always more frequent in later times.
These remarks carry us beyond Genesis i.; for the Priestly Code
generally I am now able to refer to F. Giesebrecht's essay on
the criticism of the Hexateuch. Such words as QRBN, (CM, L(MT,
(#TY are each, by itself, strong arguments for assuming a late
date for the production of the Priestly Code. We cannot believe
that such everyday words should never have come into use in the
other literature before the exile, if they were in existence.
They cannot be counted technical terms: QRBN used in Hebrew for
sacrifice and offering is simply as if an English writer should
say priere instead of worship. In such comparisons of the
vocabulary we have, however, to consider first the working up
and revision which has been at work in every part of the books
of the Bible, and secondly the caprice of the writers in apparent
trifles, such as )NKY and )NY, especially outside the Pentateuch.
These two agencies have so dislocated the original facts in this
matter, that in general we can only deal in proportions, and must
be content with showing that a word occurs say 3 times in the
other literature and 27 times in an equal extent of the later. /1/
***************************************
1. Too much importance must not be attached to Aramaisms: even when
they admit of clear demonstration they prove little while
occurring merely in single instances. We early find remarkable
phenomena, such as NDR for NZR (hence NZYR = vovens), N+R for NCR
(Amos i. 11 , Y+R for Y+RP?), comp. Arabic _lata_ for _laisa_, Sur.
38, 2. Hudh. 84, 1. And yet such an Aramaism as BT #NTH in Numbers
xv. 27, or even QRBN, is very remarkable.
***************************************
IX.III.2. The study of the history of language is still at a very
elementary stage in Hebrew. In that which pertains to the
lexicographer it would do well to include in its scope the proper
names of the Old Testament; when it would probably appear that
not only Parnach (Numbers xxxiv. 25) but also composite names such
as Peda-zur, Peda-el, Nathana-el, Pazi-el, Eli-asaph, point less to
the Mosaic than to the Persian period, and have their analogies in
the Chronicles. On the other hand, the prepositions and particles
would have to be examined the use of the prepositions Beth and
Lamed in the Priestly Code is very peculiar. That would lead
further, to syntax; or better still, to rhetoric and style--a
diffcult and little cultivated field of study, but one of great
importance and lending itself readily to comparative treatment.
This treatment yields the most far-reaching results in the case
of those parallels which have an undoubted and direct relation
to each other. The dependence of the Priestly Code on the Jehovist
cannot be more strikingly demonstrated than by comparing its CDYQ,
Genesis vi. 9, with the CDYQ BDWR HZH, of Genesis vii. 1 (JE.).
The plural DRWT is quite on a line with the MYNYM, and the (MY
H)RC, of the Rabbis, and the SPERMATA of Galatians iii. 15; it
does not denote the successive generations, but contemporaries,
the contemporaneous individuals of one and the same generation.
From words we are brought back to things again by noting that the
age of the word depends in many cases on the introduction of the
thing. The name BTR in the Song of Songs, for example,
presupposes the cultivation of the malobathron in Syria and
Palestine. The Priestly Code enumerates colours, stuffs,
goldsmiths' work and jewels, which nowhere occur in the older
literature: along with the Book of Ezekiel it is the principal
quarry in the Old Testament for the history of art; and this is
the less likely to be due to chance, as the geographical horizon
of the two works is also the same. There is also some contact in
this respect, though to a less degree, between the Priestly Code
and Isaiah xl.-lxvi., and this must doubtless receive a historical
explanation in the circumstances of the Babylonian age. /l/
*********************************************
1. On Canticles cf. Schuerer's Theol. Lit. Z., 1879, p. 31. It
also, by the names of plants and similar details mentioned in it,
is an important source for the history of external civilisation.
In Isaiah liv. 11, read with the Septuagint NPK: instead of the
meaningless PWK:, and )DNYK instead of )BNYK.
********************************************
CHAPTER X. THE ORAL AND THE WRITTEN TORAH.
What importance the written letter, the book of the law, possessed
for the Jews, we all know from the New Testament. Of ancient
Israel, again, it is said in the introductory poem of Goethe's
West-Oestlicher Divan, that the word was so important there,
because it was a spoken word. The contrast which Goethe evidently
perceived is really characteristic, and deserves some further
attention.
X.I.
X.I.1. Even if it be the case that Deuteronomy and the Priestly
Code were only reduced to writing at a late period, still there
remains the Jehovistic legislation (Exodus xx.-xxiii. xxxiv.)
which might be regarded as the document which formed the
starting-point of the religious history of Israel. And this
position is in fact generally claimed for it; yet not for the
whole of it, since it is commonly recognised that the Sinaitic
Book of the Covenant (Exodus xx.-xxiii. 19) was given to a
people who were settled and thoroughly accustomed to agriculture,
and who, moreover, had passed somewhat beyond the earliest stage
in the use of money. /1/
****************************************
1. Exodus xxi. 35: compare xxi. 33 with Judges ix. 4
****************************************
The Decalogue alone is commonly maintained to be in the strictest
sense Mosaic. This is principally on account of the statement
that it was written down on the two stone tables of the sacred
ark. Yet of Deuteronomy also we read, both that it was written
on twelve stones and that it was deposited in the sacred ark
(Deuteronomy xxxi. 26). We cannot therefore place implicit reliance
on such statements. What is attested in this way of the Decalogue
seems to find confirmation in 1Kings viii. 9. But the authority
of this statement is greatly weakened by the fact that it occurs
in a passage which has undergone the Deuteronomistic revision, and
has been, in addition to this, subjected to interpolation. The more
weight must we therefore allow to the circumstance, which makes for
a different conclusion, that the name "The Ark of the Covenant"
(i.e., the box of the law) /1/ is peculiar to the later writers,
*****************************************
1. Compare 1Kings viii. 21, "the ark wherein is the covenant of
Jehovah," and viii 9, "there was nothing in the ark save the two
tables of stone, which Moses put there at Horeb, the tables of the
covenant which Jehovah had made with the children of Israel." The
Deuteronomistic expression "tables of the covenant", alternates
in the Priestly Code with that of "tables of testimony"; i e.,
likewise of the law. For H(DWT, "the testimony," 2Kings xi. 12,
read HC(DWT, "the bracelets," according to 2Samuel i. 10.
*******************************************
and, when it occurs in older narratives, is proved by its sporadic
appearance, as well as by a comparison of the Septuagint with
the Massoretic text, to be a correction. In early times the ark
was not a mere casket for the law; the "the ark of Jehovah" was of
itself important, as we see clearly enough from 1Samuel iv.-vi.
Like the twelve maccebas which surrounded the altar on the holy hill
of Shechem, and which only later assumed the character of monuments
of the law, so the ark of the covenant no doubt arose by a change
of meaning out of the old idol. If there were stones in it at all,
they probably served some other purpose than that of writing materials,
otherwise they would not have been hidden as a mystery in the
darkness of the sanctuary; they must have been exposed to public
view. Add to this that the tradition is not agreed as to the
tenor of the ten words said to have been inserted on the two
tables; two decalogues being preserved to us, Exodus xx. and
Exodus xxxiv., which are quite different from each other. It
results from this that there was no real or certain knowledge as
to what stood on the tables, and further that if there were such
stones in the ark--and probably there were--there was nothing
written on them. This is not the place to decide which of the two
versions is prior to the other; the negative result we have
obtained is sufficient for our present purpose.
X.I.2. Ancient Israel was certainly not without God-given bases
for the ordering of human life; only they were not fixed in
writing. Usage and tradition were looked on to a large extent as
the institution of the Deity. Thus, for example, the ways and
rules of agriculture. Jehovah had instructed the husbandman and
taught him the right way. He it was whose authority gave to
the unwritten laws of custom their binding power. "It is never so
done in Israel," "that is folly in Israel," and similar
expressions of insulted public conscience are of frequent occurrence,
and show the power of custom: the fear of God acts as a
motive for respecting it. "Surely there is no fear of God in
this place, and they will slay me for my wife's sake," so
Abraham says to himself in Gerar. "How shall I do such great
wrong and sin against God?" says Joseph to the woman in Egypt.
"The people of Sodom were wicked and sinned grievously against
Jehovah," we read in Genesis xiii. 13. Similarly Deuteronomy
xxv. 18: "The Amalekites attacked Israel on the march, and killed
the stragglers, all that were feeble and fell behind, and feared
not God." We see that the requirements of the Deity are known and
of force, not to the Israelites only, but to all the world; and
accordingly they are not to be identified with any positive
commands. The patriarchs observed them long before Moses. "I
know Abraham," Jehovah says, xviii. 19, "that he will command his
children to keep the way of Jehovah, to do justice and judgment."
Much greater importance is attached to the special Torah of
Jehovah, which not only sets up laws of action of universal
validity, but shows man the way in special cases of difficulty,
where he is at a loss. This Torah is one of the special gifts
with which Israel is endowed (Deuteronomy xxxiii. 4); and it is
intrusted to the priests, whose influence, during the period of
the Hebrew kings, of which we are now speaking, rested much more
on this possession than on the privilege of sacrifice. The verb
from which Torah is derived signifies in its earliest usage to
give direction, decision. The participle signifies _giver of
oracles_ in the two, examples _gibeath moreh_ and _allon moreh_.
The latter expression is explained by another which alternates
with it, "oak of the soothsayers." Now we know that the priests
in the days of Saul and David gave divine oracles by the ephod
and the lots connected with it, which answered one way or the other
to a question put in an alternative form. Their Torah grew no doubt
out of this practice. /1/ The Urim and Thummim are regarded,
*************************************
1. 1Sam xiv. xxiii. xxx. In connection with 1Samuel xxxi. 3
I have conjectured that the verb of which Torah is the abstract
means originally to throw the lot-arrows. The Thummim have been
compared in the most felicitous way by Freytag, and by Lagarde
independently of him (Proph. Chald. p. xlvii.) with the
Arabian Tamaim, which not only signifies children's amulets but
any means of "averruncatio". Urim is probably connected with
)RR "to curse" (cf. Iliad i. 11 and Numbers xxiii. 23): the two
words of the formula seem mutually to supplement each other.
************************************
according to Deuteronomy xxxiii. 8, as the true and universal insignia
of the priesthood; the ephod is last mentioned in the historical
books in 1Kings ii. 26, /1/
**************************************
1 Bleek, Einleiung in das A. T., 1878, p. 642.
**************************************
but appears to have remained in use down to the time of Isaiah
(Hosea iii. 4; Isaiah xxx. 22). The Torah freed itself in the
process of time, following the general mental movement, from such
heathenish media and vehicles (Hab. ii. 19). But it continued
to be an oral decision and direction. As a whole it is only a
power and activity of God, or of the priests. Of this subject
there can be no abstract; the TEACHING; is only thought of as
the action of the TEACHER. There is no torah as a ready-made
product, as a system existing independently of its originator and
accessible to every one: it becomes actual only in the various
utterances, which naturally form by degrees the basis of a fixed
tradition. "They preserve Thy word, and keep Thy law; they teach
Jacob Thy judgments and Israel Thy statutes " (Deuteronomy xxxiii.
9, 10).
The Torah of the priests appears to have had primarily a legal
character. In cases which there was no regular authority to
decide, or which were too difficult for human decision, the latter
was brought in the last instance before God, i.e., before the
sanctuary or the priests (Exodus xviii. 25 seq.). The priests
thus formed a kind of supreme court, which, however, rested on a
voluntary recognition of its moral authority, and could not
support its decisions by force. "If a man sin against another,
God shall judge him," 1Samuel ii. 25 says, very indefinitely.
Certain legal transactions of special solemnity are executed
before God (Exodus xxi. 6). Now in proportion as the executive
gained strength under the monarchy, _jus_--civil justice--necessarily
grew up into a separate existence from the older sacred _fas_. The
knowledge of God, which Hosea (chapter iv.) regards as the contents
of the torah, has as yet a closer connection with jurisprudence
than with theology; but as its practical issue is that God
requires of man righteousness, and faithfulness, and good-will,
it is fundamentally and essentially morality, though morality
at that time addressed its demands less to the conscience than
to society. A ritual tradition naturally developed itself even
before the exile (2Kings xvii. 27, 28). But only those rites
were included in the Torah which the priests had to teach others,
not those which they discharged themselves; even in Leviticus
this distinction may be traced; the instructions characterised
as toroth being chiefly those as to animals which might or might
not be eaten, as to clean and unclean states, as to leprosy and
its marks (cf. Deuteronomy xxiv. 8).
So it was in Israel, to which the testimony applies which we have
cited: and so it was in Judah also. There was a common proverb in
the days of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, "The Torah shall not perish
from the priest, nor counsel from the ancient, nor the word from
the prophet:" but no doubt the saying was not new in their time,
and at any rate it will apply to the earlier time as well. Not
because they sacrifice but because they teach, do the priests
here appear as pillars of the religious order of things; and
their Torah is a living power, equal to the occasion and
never-failing. Micah reproaches them with judging for reward
(iii. 11), and this shows their wisdom to have been based on a
tradition accessible to them alone; this is also shown by some
expressions of Deuteronomy (xvii. 10 seq., xxiv. 8). We have
the counterpart to the proverb above cited (Jeremiah xviii. 18;
Ezekiel vii. 26) in the complaint in Lamentations (ii. 9):
"Jerusalem is destroyed; her king and her princes are among the
Gentiles: the Torah is no more; the prophets obtain no vision
from Jehovah;" after the ruin of the sanctuary and the priests
there is no longer any Torah; and if that be so, the axe is laid
to the root of the life of the people. In the post-exile prophets
the torah, which even in Deuteronomy (xvii. 11) was mainly
legal in its nature, acquires a strong savour of ritual which one
did not notice before; yet even here it is still an oral teaching
of the priests (Haggai ii. 11).
The priests derived their Torah from Moses: they claimed only
to preserve and guard what Moses had left (Deuteronomy xxxiii 4,
9 seq.). He counted as their ancestor (xxxiii. 8; Judges xviii.
30); his father in-law is the PRIEST of Midian at Mount Sinai,
as Jehovah also is derived in a certain sense from the older deity
of Sinai. But at the same time Moses was reputed to be the
incomparable originator and practicer of PROPHECY (Numbers xii. 6
seq.; Deuteronomy xxxiv. 10; Hos. xii. 14), as his brother Aaron
also is not only a Levite (Exodus iv. 14), but also a prophet
(iv. 15; Numbers xii. 2). There is thus a close relation between
priests and prophets, i.e., seers; as with other peoples (1Samuel
vi.,; 1Kings xviii. 19, compare with 2Kings x. 19), so also
with the Hebrews. In the earliest time it was not knowing the
technique of worship, which was still very simple and
undeveloped, but being a man of God, standing on an intimate
footing with God, that made a man a priest, that is one who keeps
up the communication with heaven for others; and the seer is
better qualified than others for the office (1Kings xviii. 30
seq.). There is no fixed distinction in early times between the
two offices; Samuel is in 1Samuel i.-iii. an aspirant to the
priesthood; in ix. x. he is regarded as a seer.
In later times also, when priests and prophets drew off and
separated from each other, they yet remained connected, both in
the kingdom of Israel (Host iv. 5) and in Judah. In the latter
this was very markedly the case (2Kings xxiii. 2; Jeremiah xxvi.
7 seq., v. 31; Deuteronomy xviii. 1-8, 9-22; Zechariah vii. 3).
What connected them with each other was the revelation of Jehovah
which went on and was kept alive in both of them. It is Jehovah
from whom the torah of the priest and the word of the prophet
proceeds: He is the true DIRECTOR, as Isaiah calls Him in the
passage xxx. 20 seq., where, speaking of the Messianic time,
he says to the people, "Then thy director (MWRYK) is no more
concealed, but thine eyes see thy director, and thine ears hear
the words of One calling behind thee; this is the way, walk ye
in it; when ye are turning to the right hand or to the left."
TORAH and WORD are cognate notions, and capable of being
interchanged (Deuteronomy xxxiii. 9; Isaiah i. 10, ii. 3, v. 24,
viii. 16, 20). This explains how both priests and prophets
claimed Moses for their order: he was not regarded as the founder
of the cultus.
The difference, in the period when it had fully developed itself,
may be said to be this: the Torah of the priests was like a
spring which runs always, that of the prophets like a spring which
is intermittent, but when it does break forth, flows with all the
greater force. The priests take precedence of the prophets when
both are named together; they obviously consolidated themselves
earlier and more strongly. The order, and the tradition which
propagates itself within the order, are essential to them:
they observe and keep the torah (Deuteronomy xxxiii. 9).
For this reason, that they take their stand so entirely on the
tradition, and depend on it, their claim to have Moses for
their father, the beginner and founder of their tradition,
is in itself the better founded of the two. /l/
***********************************
1 It is also more firmly rooted in history; for if Moses did
anything at all, he certainly founded the sanctuary at Kadesh
and the torah there, which the priests of the ark carried on after
him, thus continuing the thread of the history of Israel, which
was taken up again in power by the monarchy. The prophets only
appeared among the Hebrews from the time of Samuel onwards, but
the seers were older than Moses, and can scarcely have had such
a close connection with his tradition as the priests at the
sanctuary of the ark of Jehovah.
**********************************
In the ordinary parlance of the Hebrews torah always meant first,
and chiefly the Priestly Torah. The prophets have notoriously no
father (1Samuel x. 12), their importance rests on the
individuals; it is characteristic that only names and sketches
of their lives have reached us. They do indeed, following the
tendency of the times, draw together in corporations; but in
doing so they really renounce their own distinctive
characteristics: the representative men are always single,
resting on nothing outside themselves. We have thus on the one
side the tradition of a class, which suffices for the occasions of
ordinary life, and on the other the inspiration of awakened
individuals, stirred up by occasions which are more than ordinary.
After the spirit of the oldest men of God, Moses at the head of
them, had been in a fashion laid to sleep in institutions,
it sought and found in the prophets a new opening; the old fire
burst out like a volcano through the strata which once, too, rose
fluid from the deep, but now were fixed and dead.
The element in which the prophets live is the storm of the world's
history, which sweeps away human institutions; in which the
rubbish of past generations with the houses built on it begins to
shake, and that foundation alone remains firm, which needs no
support but itself. When the earth trembles and seems to be passing
away, then they triumph because Jehovah alone is exalted. They
do not preach on set texts; they speak out of the spirit which
judges all things and itself is judged of no man. Where do they
ever lean on any other authority than the truth of what they
say; where do they rest on any other foundation than their own
certainty? It belongs to the notion of prophecy of true
revelation, that Jehovah, overlooking all the media of ordinances
and institutions, communicates Himself to the INDIVIDUAL, the
called one, in whom that mysterious and irreducible rapport in
which the deity stands with man clothes itself with energy.
Apart from the prophet, _in abstracto_, there is no revelation;
it lives in his divine-human ego. This gives rise to a synthesis
of apparent contradictions: the subjective in the highest sense,
which is exalted above all ordinances, is the truly objective,
the divine. This it proves itself to be by the consent of the
conscience of all, on which the prophets count, just as Jesus
does in the Gospel of John, in spite of all their polemic
against the traditional religion. They are not saying anything
new: they are only proclaiming old truth. While acting in the
most creative way they feel entirely passive: the _homo tantum
et audacia_ which may with perfect justice be applied to such men
as Elijah, Amos, and Isaiah, is with them equivalent to _deus
tantum et servitus_. But their creed is not to be found in
any book. It is barbarism, in dealing with such a phenomenon, to
distort its physiognomy by introducing the law.
X.I.3. It is a vain imagination to suppose that the prophets
expounded and applied the law. Malachi (circa 450 B.C.) says,
it is true, iv. 4, "Remember ye the torah of Moses my servant;"
but where shall we look for any second expression of this nature?
Much more correctly than modern scholars did these men judge, who
at the close of the preexilic history looked back on the forces
which had moulded it, both the divine and those opposed to God.
In their eyes the prophets are not the expounders of Moses, but
his continuators and equals; the word of God in their mouth is
not less weighty than in the mouth of Moses; they, as well as he,
are organs of the spirit of Jehovah by which He is present in
Israel. The immediate revelation to the people, we read in Deuteronomy
xviii., ceased with the ten commandments: from that point onwards
Jehovah uses the prophets as His mouth: "A prophet like unto
thee," He says to Moses, "will I raise up to them from among their
brethren, and will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak
unto them all that I shall command him; and whosoever shall not
hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will
require it of him."
We find it the same in Jeremiah; the voice of the prophets, always
sounding when there is need for it, occupies the place which,
according to the prevailing view, should have been filled by the
law: this living command of Jehovah is all he knows of, and not
any testament given once for all.
"This only I commanded your fathers when I brought them up out
of Egypt: Obey my voice, and walk ye in all the ways that I will
command you. Since the day that your fathers came forth out of Egypt,
I have sent unto you all my servants the prophets, daily rising up
early and sending them; but ye would not hear."
And even after the exile we meet in Zechariah (520 B.C.) the
following view of the significance of the prophets: "Thus spake
Jehovah of hosts [to the fathers before the exile], Speak true
judgment, and show mercy and compassions every man to his brother,
and oppress not the widow nor the fatherless, the stranger nor the
poor: and let none of you imagine evil against his brother in his
heart. But they refused to hearken, and shrugged the shoulder,
and stopped their ears, that they should not hear. Yea, they made
their hearts as a flint, lest they should hear the Torah and the
words which Jehovah Sebaoth hath sent by His Spirit through the
old prophets: therefore came a great wrath from Jehovah Sebaoth.
And as He cried and they would not hear, so now shall they cry
and I will not hear, and I will blow them away among the
peoples.... Thus saith Jehovah Sebaoth [after the exile to the
present generation], As I thought to punish you without pity
because your fathers provoked me to anger, so again have I
thought in these days to do well to the house of Judah: fear
ye not. These are the things that ye shall do: Speak ye every
man the truth to his neighbour; execute the judgment of truth
and peace in your gates; and let none of you imagine evil in
your hearts against his neighbour, and love no false oath,
for all these are things which I hate, saith Jehovah"
(Zechariah vii. 9-11, viii. 14-16).
The contents of the Torah, on obedience to which the theocracy is
here based, are very suggestive, as also its derivation from the
"old" prophets. Even Ezra can say (ix. 10, 11):
"We have forsaken Thy commandments which Thou hast commanded by the
servants the prophets, saying, The land unto which ye go to
possess it is an unclean land with the filthiness of the people of
the land, which have filled it from one end to another with their
uncleanness."
He is thinking of Deuteronomy, Ezekiel, and Leviticus xvii.-xxvi.
Of those who at the end reflected on the meaning of the
development which had run its course, the writer of Isaiah
xl.-lxvi. occupies the first place. The Torah, which he also
calls _mishpat_, right (i.e., truth), appears to him to be the
divine and imperishable element in Israel. With him, however,
it is inseparable from its mouthpiece, the servant of Jehovah,
xlii. 1-4, xlix. 1-6, l. 4-9, lii. 13-liii. 12. The name would
denote the prophet, but here it stands for the people, a prophet
on a large scale. Israel's calling is not that of the
world-monarchies, to make sensation and noise in the streets
(xiii. 1-4), but the greater one of promulgating the Torah and
getting it received. This is to be done both in Israel and among
the heathen. What makes Israel a prophet is not his own inner
qualities, but his relation to Jehovah, his calling as the
depository of divine truth: hence it involves no contradiction
that the servant should begin his work in Israel itself. /1/
*************************************
1. This is as if one were to say that there is much to be done
before we Evangelicals are truly evangelical. Yet the
distinction as worked out in Isaiah xl. seq. is certainly very
remarkable, and speaks for a surprising degree of profound
meditation.
************************************
Till now he has spent his strength only in the bosom of his own
people, which is always inclined to fall away from Jehovah and
from itself: heedless of reproach and suffering he has laboured
unweariedly in carrying out the behests of his Master and has
declared His word. All in vain. He has not been able to avert
the victory of heathenism in Israel, now followed by its victory
over Israel. Now in the exile Jehovah has severed His relation
with His people; the individual Hebrews survive, but the servant,
the people of Jehovah, is dead. Then is the Torah to die with
him, and truth itself to succumb to falsehood, to heathenism?
That cannot be; truth must prevail, must come to the light.
As to the Apostle Paul the Spirit is the earnest of the
resurrection of those who are born again, so to our author the
Torah is the pledge of the resurrection of Israel, the
justification of the servant of Jehovah. The final triumph of
the cause, which is God's, will surpass all expectations. Not
only in Israel itself will the Torah, will the servant of Jehovah
prevail and bring about a regeneration of the people: the truth
will in the future shine forth from Israel into the whole world,
and obtain the victory among all the Gentiles (xlix. 6). Then it
will appear that the work of the servant, resultless as it seemed
to be up to the exile, has yet not been in vain.
It is surely unnecessary for me to demonstrate how uncommonly
vivid, I might say how uncommonly historical, the notion of the
Torah is as here set forth, and how entirely incompatible that
notion is with "the Torah of Moses." It might most fitly be
compared with the Logos of the prologue of John, if the latter
is understood in accordance with John x. 35, an utterance
certainly authentic, and not according to Philo. As Jesus is
the revelation of God made man, so the servant of Jehovah is
the revelation of God made a people. The similarity of their
nature and their significance involves the similarity of their
work and of their sufferings, so that the Messianic interpretation
of Isaiah lii. 13-liii. 12 is in fact one which could not fail to
suggest itself. /1/
******************************************
1. The personification is carried further in this passage than
anywhere else, and it is possible that the colours of the sketch
are borrowed from some actual instance of a prophet-martyr: yet
the Ebed Jahve cannot have a different meaning here from that
which it has everywhere else. It is to be noted that the
sufferings and death of the servant are in the past, and his
glorification in the future, a long pause lying between them in
the present. A resurrection of the individual could not be in
the mind of the writer of Isaiah xl seq., nor do the details of
the description, lii. 12 seq., at all agree with such an idea.
Moreover, it is clear that liv. 1-lvi. 8 is a kind of sermon on
the text lii. 13-liii. 12; and there the prophecy of the
glorification of the servant has reference to Zion. See Vatke,
p. 528 seq.
*******************************************
X.II.
X.II.1. In the 18th year of King Josiah (621 B.C) Deuteronomy was
found and published. In the account of the discovery, 2Kings
xxii. xxiii., it is always called simply _the book of the Torah_;
it was accordingly the first, and in its time the only book of
the kind. It is certainly the case that the prophets had written
down some of their speeches before this, and the priests also may
before this time have written down many of their precepts: it
appears in fact, as Vatke surmises, that we have a monument of
their spirit, e.g., in the Sinaitic Book of the Covenant.
Deuteronomy presupposes earlier attempts of this kind, and
borrows its materials largely from them; but on the other hand it
is distinguished from them not only by its greater compass but
also by its much higher claims. It is written with the distinct
intention not to remain a private memorandum, but to obtain public
authority as a book. The idea of making a definite formulated
written Torah the law of the land, is the important point /1/
**************************************
1. Duhm, ap. Cil. p. 201.
**************************************
it was a first attempt and succeeded at the outset beyond
expectation. A reaction set in afterwards, it is true; but the
Babylonian exile completed the triumph of the law. Extraordinary
excitement was at that time followed by the deepest depression
(Amos viii. 11 seq.). At such a time those who did not despair
of the future clung anxiously to the religious acquisitions of the
past. These had been put in a book just in time in Deuteronomy,
with a view to practical use in the civil and religious life of
the people . The book of the Torah did not perish in the general
ruin, but remained in existence, and was the compass of those who
were shaping their course for a new Israel. How thoroughly
determined they were to use it as their rule we see from the
revision of the Hexateuch and of the historical books which was taken
in hand during the exile.
With the appearance of the law came to an end the old freedom,
not only in the sphere of worship, now restricted to Jerusalem,
but in the sphere of the religious spirit as well. There was now
in existence an authority as objective as could be; and this was
the death of prophecy.
For it was a necessary condition of prophecy that the tares
should be at liberty to grow up beside the wheat. The signs given
in Deuteronomy to distinguish the true from the false prophet,
are no doubt vague and unpractical: still they show the tendency
towards control and the introduction of uniformity; that is the
great step which is new. /1/
****************************************
1. The difference between Deuteronomy xviii. 22 and 1Kings xxii.
19-23 may be thought to throw light on the two positions. In the
former passage we read that if a prophet says something in the
name of Jehovah which does not come to pass, it is a word which
Jehovah has not spoken. Here, on the contrary, Micaiah ben Imlah,
when the prophets of Jehovah promise the king of Israel a happy
issue of the campaign against the Syrians, regards the prediction
as contrary to the truth, but as none the less on that account
inspired by the spirit of prophecy; Jehovah, he said, had made
his spirit a Iying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. It
may be that this difference reflects to us the interval between
two different ages: but on the whole Micaiah's view appears to be
rather a piece of ingenuity which might have been resorted to in
later times as well. In the seventh century the command, "every
firstborn is mine," was held to apply to the human firstborn as
well, the sacrifice of which Jehovah was thought to require: this
appears from Jeremiah's protest, "I commanded them not, neither
came it into my mind," vii. 31, xix. 5. With reference to this
Ezekiel says that because the Israelites despised the wholesome
commandments of Jehovah, He gave them laws which were not good and
statutes by which they could not live. That is a similar
ingenious escape from a difficulty, without deeper meaning. See
the converse, Koran, Sura ii. 174.
*********************************************
It certainly was not the intention of the legislator to encroach
upon the spoken Torah or the free word. But the consequence,
favoured by outward circumstances, was not to be avoided: the
feeling that the prophets had come to an end did not arise in the
Maccabean wars only. In the exile we hear the complaint that the
instruction of the priests and the word of the prophets are silent
(Lamentations ii. 9); it is asked, where he is who in former times
put his spirit in Israel (Isa lxiii. 11); in Nehemiah's time a
doubtful question is left unsettled, at least theoretically, till
the priest with Urim and Thummim, i.e., with a trustworthy
prophecy, shall appear (Nehemiah vii. 69). We may call Jeremiah the
last of the prophets: /2/
*********************************
2. In his early years Jeremiah had a share in the introduction of
the law: but in later times he shows himself little edified by
the effects it produced: the Iying pen of the scribes, he says,
has written for a lie. People despised the prophetic word because
they had the Torah in black and white (viii. 7-9).
**********************************
those who came after him were prophets only in name. Ezekiel had
swallowed a book (iii. 1-3), and gave it out again. He also,
like Zechariah, calls the pre-exilic prophets the old prophets,
conscious that he himself belongs to the epigoni: he meditates on
their words like Daniel and comments on them in his own prophecy
(xxxviii. 17, xxxix. 8). The writer of Isaiah xl. seq. might with
much more reason be called a prophet, but he does not claim to be
one; his anonymity, which is evidently intentional, leaves no doubt
as to this. He is, in fact, more of a theologian: he is principally
occupied in reflecting on the results of the foregoing development,
of which prophecy had been the leaven; these are fixed possessions
now secured; he is gathering in the harvest. As for the prophets
after the exile, we have already seen how Zechariah speaks of the
old prophets as a series which is closed, in which he and those
like him are not to be reckoned. In the writing of an anonymous
contemporary which is appended to his book we find the following
notable expression:
"In that (hoped-for) day, saith Jehovah, I will cut off the names
of the idols out of the land, that they be no more remembered,
and also I will cause to cease the prophets and the unclean
spirit; and if a man will yet prophesy, his parents shall say
unto him, Thou shalt not live, for thou speakest lies in the name
of Jehovah, and his parents shall thrust him through when he
prophesieth" (xiii. 2-3).
X.II.2. Deuteronomy was the programme of a reform, not of a
restoration. It took for granted the existence of the cultus,
and only corrected it in certain general respects. But the temple
was now destroyed and the worship interrupted, and the practice of
past times had to be written down if it was not to be lost. Thus
it came about that in the exile the conduct of worship became the
subject of the Torah, and in this process reformation was naturally
aimed at as well as restoration. We have seen ) that
Ezekiel was the first to take this step which the circumstances of
the time indicated. In the last part of his work he made the
first attempt to record the ritual which had been customary in
the temple of Jerusalem. Other priests attached themselves to him
(Leviticus xvii.-xxvi.), and thus there grew up in the exile from
among the members of this profession a kind of school of people
who reduced to writing and to a system what they had formerly
practiced in the way of their calling. After the temple was
restored this theoretical zeal still continued to work, and the
ritual when renewed was still further developed by the action and
reaction on each other of theory and practice: the priests who
had stayed in Babylon took as great a part, from a distance, in
the sacred services, as their brothers at Jerusalem who had
actually to conduct them. The latter indeed lived in adverse
circumstances and do not appear to have conformed with great
strictness or accuracy to the observances which had been agreed
upon. The last result of this labour of many years is the
Priestly Code. It has indeed been said that we cannot ascribe
the creation of such a work to an age which was bent on nothing
but repristination. Granted that this is a correct description of
it, such an age is peculiarly fitted for an artificial
systematising of given materials, and this is what the originality
of the Priestly Code in substance amounts to. /1/
********************************************
1. Dillmann arrives at the conclusion that the assumption is the
most natural one in the world, and still capable of proof from ACD
(!) that the priesthood of the central sanctuary wrote down their
toroth even in early times; and that it is absurd to suppose
that the priestly and ceremonial laws were first written down,
or even made, in the exile and in Babylon, where there was no
worship. We will let it be absurd, if it is true. It is not
progress, though it is a fact, that the kings were succeeded by
the high-priests, and the prophets by the Rabbis. Yet it is a
thing which is likely to occur, that a body of traditional
practice should only be written down when it is threatening to
die out, and that a book should be, as it were, the ghost of a
life which is closed.
********************************************
The Priestly Code, worked into the Pentateuch as the standard
legislative element in it, became the definite "Mosaic law."
As such it was published and introduced in the year 444 B.C.,
a century after the exile . In the interval, the duration of which
is frequently under-estimated, Deuteronomy alone had been known
and recognised as the written Torah, though as a fact the essays of
Ezekiel and his successors may have had no inconsiderable
influence in leading circles. The man who made the Pentateuch the
constitution of Judaism was the Babylonian priest and scribe,
Ezra. He had come from Babylon to Jerusalem as early as the year
458 B.C., the seventh of Artaxerxes Longimanus, at the head of a
considerable company of zealous Jews, provided it is said with a
mandate from the Persian king, empowering him to reform according
to the law the congregation of the temple, which had not yet been
able to consolidate itself inwardly nor to shut itself off
sufficiently from those without.
"Thou art sent of the king and of his seven counsellors to hold an
inquiry concerning Judah and Jerusalem _according to the law of thy
God which is in thine hand_....And thou Ezra, according to _the
wisdom of thy God which is in thine hand_, set magistrates and
judges which may judge all the people that are beyond the river,
all such as acknowledge the laws of thy God, and teach ye them
that know them not. And whosoever will not do the law of thy God
and the law of the king, let him be prosecuted."
So we read in the commission of the Persian king to Ezra, vii.
12-26; which, even should it be spurious, must yet reflect the
views of his contemporaries. The expression taken from Ezra's
own memoirs, vii. 27, leaves no doubt that he was assisted by
Artaxerxes in the objects he had in view. /1/
***************************************
1. With regard to his relation to the law, we have to consider the
following points: he was a scribe (SWPR = literatus), at home in
the Torah of Moses, vii. 6. He had directed his mind to study
the Torah of Jehovah, and to do and to teach in Israel judgment
and statute, vii. 10. "The priest Ezra, the master of the law
of the God of heaven," vii. 21. The most important expression,
however, is that which states that the law (the wisdom) of his God
was in his hand: thus it was his private property, though it
claimed authority for all Israel. With this agree the statements
as to the object of the learned priest's mission.
**************************************
But Ezra did not, as we should expect, at once introduce the law
on his arrival in Judah. In concert with the heads of the people,
and proceeding on the existing Torah, that, namely, of
Deuteronony, he ordained and relentlessly carried out a strict
separation of the returned exiles from the heathen and
half-heathen inhabitants of the land. This was done a few months
after his arrival in Jerusalem. But a long time, at least
fourteen years, elapsed before he produced the law which he had
brought with him. Why he delayed so long we can at the best only
surmise, as no accounts have reached us of what he did in the
interval; there is a great gap in the narrative of the Books of
Ezra and Nehemiah between the 7th and the 20th year of Artaxerxes.
Perhaps the outward circumstances of the young community, which,
probably in consequence of the repellent attitude taken up to the
surrounding peoples, were not of the happiest, made it unadvisable
at once to introduce a legislative innovation; perhaps, too, Ezra
desired to wait to see the correcting influence of the practice of
Jerusalem on the product of Babylonian scholarship, and moreover
to train up assistants for the work. The principal reason,
however, appears to have been, that in spite of the good-will of
the king he did not enjoy the energetic support of the Persian
authorities on the spot, and could not without it get the
authority of the new law recognised.
But in the year 445 it came about that a Jew and a sympathiser of
Ezra, Nehemiah ben Hakkelejah, cup-bearer and favourite of
Artaxerxes, appeared in Judea as Persian governor. With
straightforward earnestness he first addressed himself to the task
of liberating the Jewish community from outward pressure and
lifting them up from their depressed condition; and, this being
accomplished, the time had come to go forward with the introduction
of the Pentateuch. Ezra and Nehemiah were manifestly in concert
as to this. On the 1st day of the 7th month--we do not know the
year, but it cannot have been earlier than 444 B.C.--the whole
people came together as one man before the water-gate, and Ezra
was called on to produce the book of the law of Moses, which
Jehovah had commanded Israel. The scribe mounted a wooden pulpit;
seven priests stood beside him on the right hand, and seven on the
left. When he opened the book all present stood up, both men and
women; with loud Amen they joined in the opening blessing, lifted
up their heads, and cast themselves on the ground. Then he read
the book, from early morning till mid-day, in small sections,
which were repeated and expounded by a number of Levites dispersed
throughout the crowd. The effect was that a general weeping arose,
the people being aware that they had not till then followed the
commandments of God. Nehemiah and Ezra and the Levites had to
allay the excitement, and said: "This day is holy unto Jehovah
your God; mourn not nor weep. Go your way, eat the fat and drink
the sweet, and give unto them that have brought nothing with them."
The assembled people then dispersed and set on foot a "great mirth,"
because they had understood the words which had been communicated
to them. The reading was continued the next day, but before the
heads of families only, and a very appropriate section was read,
viz., the ordinances as to festivals, and particularly that about
the feast of tabernacles, which was to be kept under branches of
trees on the 15th day of the 7th month, the month then just
beginning. The matter was taken up with the greatest zeal, and
the festival, which had not been kept RITE since the days
of Joshua ben Nun, was now instituted in accordance with the
precepts of Leviticus xxiii. and celebrated with general enthusiasm
from the 15th to the 22nd of the month. /1/
***************************************
1. For eight days, according to Leviticus xxiii. 39: as against
Deuteronomy xvi. 13-15.
***************************************
On the 24th, however, a great day of humiliation was held, with
sackcloth and ashes. On this occasion also the proceedings began
with reading the law, and then followed a confession of sins
spoken by the Levites in the name of the people, and concluding
with a prayer for mercy and compassion. This was preparatory to
the principal and concluding act, in which the secular and
spiritual officials and elders, 85 in number, bound themselves
in writing to the Book of the Law, published by Ezra, and all
the rest undertook an obligation, with oath and curse, to walk
in the Torah of God, given by His servant Moses, and to keep
all the commandments of Jehovah and His statutes and laws.
Special attention was directed to such provisions of the Pentateuch
as were of immediate importance for the people in the circumstances
of the day--the greater part of the whole work is about the ritual
of the priests--and those were in particular insisted on which
refer to the contributions of the laity to the priesthood, on
which the very existence of the hierocracy depended. /1/
***************************************
1. Nehemiah viii. 1-x. 40. The credibility of the narrative
appears on the face of it. The writer of Chronicles did not write
it himself, but took it from his main source, from which also he
drew the fragments he gives us of the memoirs of Ezra and
Nehemiah. This we see from the fact that while copying Nehemiah vii.
in Ezra ii. he unconsciously goes on with the beginning of Nehemiah
viii. (= Ezra iii. 1). That shows that he found Nehemiah vii. and
viii. in their present connection, and did not write viii. seq.
himself, as we might suppose.
**************************************
Lagarde expresses great surprise--and the surprise is reasonable--
that so little importance is attributed to this narrative by Old
Testament critics; only Kuenen had rightly appreciated its
significance. /2/
******************************************
2 Goettinger Gel. Anzeigen, 1870, p. 1557 seq. Kuenen, Religion
of Israel, vol. ii. chapter viii.
******************************************
It is obvious that Nehemiah viii.-x. is a close parallel to 2Kings
xxii. xxiii., especially to xxiii. 1-3. There we read that
Josiah caused all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem to come
together, and went up with the men of Judah and the inhabitants of
Jerusalem, with the priests and the prophets and all the people,
high and low, to the house of Jehovah; where he read to the
assemblage all the words of the Book of the Law, and bound himself
with all the people before Jehovah to keep all the words of the
book. Just as it is in evidence that Deuteronomy became known in
the year 621, and that it was unknown up to that date, so it is in
evidence that the remaining Torah of the Pentateuch--for there is
no doubt that the law of Ezra was the whole Pentateuch--became
known in the year 444 and was unknown till then. This shows in the
first place, and puts it beyond question, that Deuteronomy is the
first, and the priestly Torah the second, stage of the
legislation. But in the second place, as we are accustomed to
infer the date of the composition of Deuteronomy from its
publication and introduction by Josiah, so we must infer the date
of the composition of the Priestly Code from its publication and
introduction by Ezra and Nehemiah. It would require very strong
internal evidence to destroy the probability, thus based on a
most positive statement of facts, that the codification of the
ritual only took place in the post-exile period. We have already
seen of what nature the internal evidence is which is brought
forward with this view. /1/
********************************************
1. It is not, however, necessary, and it can scarcely be correct,
to make Ezra more than the editor, the real and principal editor,
of the Hexateuch: and in particular he is not likely to have
been the author of Q. Nor on the other hand is it meant to deny
that many new features may have been added and alterations made
after Ezra. A body of customs is a subject which can scarcely
be treated quite exhaustively. There are no directions about the
_nervus ischiadicus_ <**sciatic nerve??**>, about the priests
having their feet bare, about shutting up before Jehovah
(1Samuel xxi cf. Jeremiah xxxvi. 5), or about the stoning of adulterers.
*******************************************
X.II.3. Ezra and Nehemiah, and the eighty-five men of the great
assembly (Nehemiah viii. seq.), who are named as signatories of
the covenant, are regarded by later tradition as the founders of
the canon. And not without reason: only King Josiah has a still
stronger claim to this place of honour. The introduction of the
law, first Deuteronomy, and then the whole Pentateuch, was in fact
the decisive step, by which the written took the place of the
spoken word, and the people of the word became a "people of the
book." To THE BOOK were added in course of time THE BOOKS; the
former was formally and solemnly introduced in two successive
acts, the latter acquired imperceptibly a similar public authority
for the Jewish church. The notion of the canon proceeds entirely
from that of the written Torah; the prophets and the hagiographa
are also called Torah by the Jews, though not Torah of Moses.
The origin of the canon thus lies, thanks to the two narratives
2Kings xxii. xxiii., Nehemiah viii.-x. in the full light of
history; but the traditional science of Biblical introduction has
no clear or satisfactory account to give of it. Josiah, the
ordinary notion is, introduced the law, but not the canon; Ezra,
on the other hand, the canon and not the law. An analogy drawn
from the secondary part of the canon, the prophets and
hagiographa, is applied without consideration to the primary
part, the Torah of Moses. The historical and prophetical books
were, in part at least, a long time in existence before they
became canonical, and the same, it is thought, might be the case
with the law. But the case of the law is essentially different.
The law claims to have public authority, to be a book of the
community; the difference between law and canon, does not exist.
Hence it is easy to understand that the Torah, though as a
literary product later than the historical and prophetical books,
is yet as law older than these writings, which have originally
and in their nature no legal character, but only acquired such
a character in a sort of metaphorical way, through their association
with the law itself.
When it is recognised that THE CANON is what distinguishes Judaism
from ancient Israel, it is recognised at the same time that what
distinguishes Judaism from ancient Israel is THE WRITTEN TORAH.
The water which in old times rose from a spring, the Epigoni
stored up in cisterns.
CHAPTER XI. THE THEOCRACY AS IDEA AND AS INSTITUTION.
Writers of the present day play with the expressions "theocracy,"
and "theocratic" without making it clear to themselves
what these words mean and how far they are entitled to use them.
But we know that the word theokratia was only coined by
Josephus; /1/
***************************************
1. )OUKOUN )APEIROI MEN (AI KATA MEROS TWN )ETHWN KAI TWN NOMWN PARA
TOIS )APASIN )ANTHRWPOS DIAFORAI. )OI MEN GAR MONARXIAIS, (OI DE
TAIS )OLIGWN DUNASTEIAIS, )ALLOI DE TOIS PLHTHESIN )EPETREPYAN THN
'ECOUSIAN TWN POLITEUMATWN. (O D' (HMETEROS NOMOQETHS )EIS MEN
TOUTWN OUD' (OTIOUN )APEIDEN, (WS D' )AN TIS )EIPOI BIASAMENOS TON
LOGON QEOKRATIAN )APEDEICE TO POLITEUMA, QEW| THN )ARXHN KAI TO
KRATOS )ANAQEIS (contra Apion ii. 17). (" There are innumerable
differences in the particular customs and laws that are among
mankind; some have intrusted the power of their states to
monarchies, some to oligarchies, and some to democracies: but our
legislator had no regard to any of these forms, _but he ordered
our governmernt to be what I may call by a strained expression a
theocracy_, attributing the power and the authority to God."
Compare also, on this whole chapter, Die Pharisaer und die
Sadducaer, Greifswald, 1874.
*****************************************
and when this writer speaks of the Mosaic constitution, he has
before his eyes, it is well known, the sacred community of his
own day as it existed down to the year 70 A.D. In ancient Israel
the theocracy never existed in fact as a form of constitution.
The rule of Jehovah is here an ideal representation; only after
the exile was it attempted to realise it in the shape of a Rule of
the Holy with outward means. It is perhaps the principal merit
of Vatke's Biblical Theology to have traced through the centuries
the rise of the theocracy and the metamorphosis of the idea to an
institution.
XI.I.
XI.I.1. The upholders of the prevailing view do not assert that
Moses wrote the Pentateuch, but they maintain all the more firmly
that he organised the congregation of the tabernacle in the
wilderness after the fashion described in the Priestly Code. They
seem to think that Moses had no importance further than this; as
if it were an act of no moment to cast into the field of time a
seed which the action and reaction thence arising bring an
immeasurable time after to maturity (Mark iv. 26 seq.). In fact
Moses is the originator of the Mosaic constitution in about the
same way as Peter is the founder of the Roman hierarchy. Of the
sacred organisation supposed to have existed from the earliest
times, there is no trace in the time of the judges and the kings.
It is thought to have been a sort of pedagogic strait-waistcoat,
to subdue the ungovernable obstinacy of the Hebrews and to guard
them from evil influences from without. But even should it be
conceded that a constitution could come into existence in ancient
times which was so utterly out of relation to the peculiar life
and temper of the people, the history of the ancient Israelites
shows us nothing so distinctly as the uncommon freshness and
naturalness of their impulses. The persons who appear always
act from the constraining impulse of their nature, the men of
God not less than the murderers and adulterers: they are such
figures as could only grow up in the open air. Judaism, which
realised the Mosaic constitution and carried it out logically,
left no free scope for the individual; but in ancient Israel
the divine right did not attach to the institution but was in
the Creator Spirit, in individuals. Not only did they speak
like the prophets, they also acted like the judges and kings,
from their own free impulse, not in accordance with an outward
norm, and yet, or just because of this, in the Spirit of Jehovah.
The different view of different times is seen very characteristically
in the views taken of Saul by the two versions above sifted and
compared .
XI.I.2. It is a simple and yet a very important remark of Vatke,
that the sacred constitution of the congregation, so circumstantially
described to us in the Priestly Code, is after all very
defective, and presupposes the existence of that which it was the
chief task of the age of Moses to bring about, namely the state,
in the absence of which the church cannot have any subsistence
either. To maintain an elaborate and expensive worship, and an
immense swarm of clergy, must have required considerable rates and
taxes: and to raise these, as well as to uphold the authority of
the sacred persons and institutions, and most of all to enforce
the strict centralization and uniformity of the legitimate
worship, all this among a people not yet very civilised, must have
required an executive power which embraced and was able to
control, the whole people. But where is this central authority
in the period of the judges? Judicial competence resided at that
time chiefly in the smallest circles, the families and houses.
These were but little controlled, as it appears, by the superior
power of the tribe, and the very notion of the state or of the
kingdom did not as yet exist. Houses related to each other
sometimes united for common undertakings, as no doubt also did
neighbouring tribes; but this was not on the basis of any
constitutional order, but from necessity, when it happened that
a well-known man came forward to take the command and his summons
to the levy was obeyed. These transient combinations under generals
were the forerunners of a permanent union under a king: and even
at the time of the Midianite war an attempt seems to have been
made in this direction, which, however, was not quite successful.
In the severe and protracted struggle with the Philistines the
necessity for a solid union of the tribes was cryingly manifest,
and the man came forward to meet the hour. Saul, a distinguished
Benjamite of Gibeah, was overcome by anger at the scornful
challenge which even the Ammonites ventured at such a time to cast
in the teeth of his people: he called his fellow-countrymen to battle,
not in virtue of any office he held, but on the strength of his
own impulses; his enthusiasm proved contagious, none dared to say
him nay. He began his career just like one of the earlier judges,
but after he had led his people to victory they did not let him
retire again. The person sought for, the king, was found.
Out of such natural beginnings did the state at that time arise:
it owed nothing to the pattern of the "Mosaic theocracy," but
bears all the marks of a new creation. Saul and David first made
out of the Hebrew tribes a real people in the political sense
(Deuteronomy xxxiii. 5). David was in the eyes of later generations
inseparable from the idea of Israel: he was the king par
excellence: Saul was thrown into the shade, but both together are
the founders of the kingdom, and have thus a much wider importance
than any of their successors. It was they who drew the life of
the people together at a centre, and gave it an aim; to them the
nation is indebted for its historical self-consciousness. All the
order of aftertimes is built up on the monarchy; it is the soil
out of which all the other institutions of Israel grow up. In the
time of the judges, we read, every man did that which was right
in his own eyes, not because the Mosaic constitution was not in
force, but because there was no king in those days. The
consequences were very important in the sphere of religion as well:
since the political advance of the people brought the historic
and national character of Jehovah to the front again. During the
time of the judges the Canaanite festival cultus had gradually
been coming to be embodied in the worship of Jehovah, a process
which was certainly necessary; but in this process there was for
some time a danger that Jehovah would become a God of husbandry
and of cattle, like Baal-Dionysus. The festivals long continued
to be a source of heathenism, but now they were gradually divested
of their character as nature-festivals, and forced at length to
have reference to the nation and to its history, if they were not
to disappear completely. The relation of Jehovah to people and
kingdom remained firm as a rock: even to the worst idolaters He was
the God of Israel; in war no one thought of looking for victory
and success to any other God. This was the result of Israel's
becoming a kingdom: the kingship of Jehovah, in that precise
sense which we associate with it, is the religious expression of
the fact of the foundation of the kingdom by Saul and David. The
theocracy was the state of itself; the ancient Israelites
regarded the civil state as a miracle, or, in their own words,
a help of God. When the later Jews thought or spoke of the
theocracy, they took the state for granted as already there, and
so they could build the theocracy on the top of it as a
specially spiritual feature: just as we moderns sometimes see the
divine element in settled ordinances, such as marriage, not in
their own nature, but in the consecration added to them by the church.
XI.I.3. The kingdom of Saul and David did not long remain at its
height. Decay set in even at the separation, and when once the
Assyrians were heard at the door, it advanced with steps not to be
arrested. But the memory of the period of glory and power was
all the greener, and the hope arose of its return. From the
contrast between the sorrowful present and the brilliant past there
arose the picture of the state as it should be; when ruin was
seen without and anarchy within, the prophets set against this
the pattern of the theocracy. The theocracy as the prophets
represent it to themselves is not a thing essentially different
from the political community, as a spiritual differs from a secular
power; rather, it rests on the same foundations and is in fact
the ideal of the state. Isaiah gave this ideal its classical form
in those pictures of the future which we are accustomed to call
Messianic prophecies. These passages are not predictions of this
or that occurrence, but announcements of the aims which, it is true,
the prophet only expects the future to realise, but which are of
force or ought to be of force in the present, and towards which the
community, if true to its own nature, must strive.
The first feature of these Messianic descriptions is the expulsion
of the Assyrians; but most emphasis is laid on the restoration of
the inner bases of the state, the rottenness of which has brought
about and rendered inevitable the present crisis. The collapse of
the government, the paralysis fallen on the law, the spoliation of
the weak by the strong, these are the evils that call for redress.
"How is the honourable city become a harlot; it was full of
judgment, righteousness lodged in it--but now murderers! Thy
princes are rascals and companions of thieves, every one loveth
gifts and followeth after bribes; they judge not the fatherless,
neither cloth the cause of the widow come unto them. Therefore
saith the Lord: Ah, I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avenge
me of mine enemies! And I will turn my hand against thee, Zion,
and as with Iye I will purge away thy dross, and I will restore
thy judges as at the first, and thy counsellors as at the
beginning; afterwards thou shalt be called a righteous and
honourable city. Zion shall be redeemed by judgment and her
inhabitants by righteousness" (Isaiah i. 21-27).
The state the prophet has before his eye is always the natural
state as it exists, never a community distinguished by a peculiar
holiness in its organisation. The kingdom of Jehovah is with him
entirely identical with the kingdom of David; the tasks he sets
before it are political in their nature, similar, we might say,
to the demands one would address to the Turkish Empire in our own
days. He is unconscious of any difference between human and divine
law: law in itself, jurist's law in the proper juristic sense of
the word, is divine, and has behind it the authority of the Holy
One of Israel.
In that day shall Jehovah of hosts be for a crown of glory and a
diadem of beauty unto the residue of His people, and for a spirit
of judgment to him that sitteth in judgment, and a spirit of strength
to them that drive back the battle from the borders " (xxviii. 5, 6).
Jehovah is a true and perfect King, hence justice is His principal
attribute and His chief demand. And this justice is a purely forensic
or social notion: the righteousness of the Sermon on the Mount can
only come into consideration when civil justice and order have come
to be a matter of course--which at that time they had not yet done.
The representative of Jehovah is the human king. The earthly
ruler is not in the way of the heavenly: even the glorious
kingdom of the future cannot dispense with him.
"Then a king shall reign in righteousness and princes shall rule
in judgment; each of them shall be as an hiding-place from the wind
and as a covert from the tempest; as rivers of waters in a dry place,
as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land" (xxxii. 1, 2).
As the reigning king is in general unsatisfactory, Isaiah hopes for
a new one who will answer the pattern of David of old, the Messiah.
"There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a
branch shall grow out of his roots: and the spirit of Jehovah
shall rest upon Him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the
spirit of counsel and of warlike might, the spirit of knowledge
and of the fear of the Lord; and His breath shall be drawn in the
fear of Jehovah. And He shall not judge after the sight of His
eyes, nor decide by hearsay: but with righteousness shall He
judge the poor, and give sentence with equity for the meek of the
earth; but He shall smite the scorners with the rod of His mouth,
and with the breath of His lips shall He slay the wicked, so that
righteousness shall be the girdle of His loins, and faithfulness
the girdle of His reins. Then the wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid: and the calf and the
young lion together, and a little child shall lead them. And the
cow and the bear shall feed, their young ones shall lie down
together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox: and the
sucking child shall stroke the head of the adder, and the weaned
child shall put his hand on the eye-ball of the basilisk. They
shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain" (xi. 1-9)
This is generally considered to be a prediction of a universal
golden age on earth; but Isaiah only speaks of the holy
mountain as the scene, meaning by this the whole city of David
as the centre of his kingdom. The just and strict government of
the descendant of David is to bring it about that righteousness
and truth kiss each other, and that the strong do not dare to
injure the weak. Fear of the severity of the law engenders
general confidence; the lamb is no longer afraid of the wolf. The
opposite of this ideal is lawlessness and anarchy within, not war
without; the hope is not that of international peace, as we see
both from verse 1-5 and from verse 9. The Messiah is adorned just
with the virtues which befit a ruler; and this shows sufficiently
what is the nature of the kingdom of which he is to be the head,
i.e., what is the notion of the theocracy.
The other prophets of this period agree with Isaiah (Lamentations iv.
20), only Hosea is peculiar in this as in other points. He
appears to have regarded the kingdom as such as an evil; in more
than one expression he makes it the antithesis of the rule of
Jehovah. But we have to remember that this judgment of his is
based entirely on his historical experience. In the kingdom of
the ten tribes the supreme power was constantly being seized by
usurpers, so that instead of being the pillar of order and law it
was the plaything of parties and the occasion of incessant
disturbances. It is this North-Israelite kingdom that Hosea has
in view; and he reprobates it for no other reason than that, in
the three hundred years of its existence, it has not approved
itself, and does not approve itself in the present time of need.
He does not proceed as on _a priori_ theory, he does not apply as
his rule a pattern of the theocratic constitution given
antecedently to any historical development. There can be no
doubt that it never entered his head that the form God desired the
community to take was not a thing to be determined by circumstances,
but had been revealed at Mount Sinai. /1/
*****************************************
1. He even speaks with favour of David and the kingdom of Judah,
but I consider all such references in Hosea (as well as in Amos)
to, be interpolations. In i. 7 there is a reference to the
deliverance of Jerusalem under Hezekiah.
*****************************************
XI.I.4. Nor did the theocracy exist from the time of Moses in the
form of the covenant, though that was afterwards a favourite mode
of regarding it. The relation of Jehovah to Israel was in its nature
and origin a natural one; there was no interval between Him and
His people to call for thought or question. Only when the
existence of Israel had come to be threatened by the Syrians and
Assyrians, did such prophets as Elijah and Amos raise the Deity
high above the people, sever the natural bond between them, and
put in its place a relation depending on conditions, conditions of
a moral character. To them Jehovah was the God of righteousness
in the first place, and the God of Israel in the second place, and
even that only so far as Israel came up to the righteous demands
which in His grace He had revealed to him. They inverted the
order of these two fundamental articles of faith. "If your sins
are as scarlet, how should they be reckoned white as snow? If
they are red like crimson, how should they be as wool? If ye
be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land,
but if ye refuse and rebel, ye must eat the sword, for the mouth
of Jehovah hath spoken it."
Thus the nature of the conditions which Jehovah required of His
people came to the very front in considering His relations with
them: the Torah of Jehovah, which originally, like all His dealings,
fell under the category of divine aid, especially in the doing of
justice, of divine guidance in the solution of difficult questions,
was now conceived of as incorporating the demands on the fulfilment
of which His attitude towards Israel entirely depended. In this way
arose, from ideas which easily suggested it, but yet as an entirely
new thing, the substance of the notion of covenant or treaty. The
name Berith, however, does not occur in the old prophets, not even
in Hosea, who certainly presents us as clearly as possible with
the thing, in his figure of the marriage of Jehovah and Israel
(Isaiah i. 21). That he was unacquainted with the technical usage
of Berith is strikingly proved by ii. 20 and vi. 7; and these
passages must decide the view we take of viii. 1, a passage which
is probably interpolated.
The NAME Berith comes, it is likely, from quite a different
quarter. The ancient Hebrews had no other conception of law nor
any other designation for it than that of a treaty. A law only
obtained force by the fact of those to whom it was given binding
themselves to keep it. So it is in Exodus xxiv. 3-8, and in
2Kings xxiii. 1-3; so also in Jeremiah xxxiv. 8 seq.--curiously
enough just as with the people of Mecca at the time of Mohammed
(lbn Hisham, p. 230 seq.). Hence also the term Sepher Berith for
the Deuteronomic as well as the Jehovistic Book of the Law.
This use of the phrase Berith (ie., treaty) for law, fitted very
well with the great idea of the prophets, and received from it in
turn an interpretation, according to which the relation of Jehovah
to Israel was conditioned by the demands of His righteousness, as
set forth in His word and instruction. In this view of the matter
Jehovah and Israel came to be regarded as the contracting parties
of the covenant by which the various representatives of the people
had originally pledged each other to keep, say, the Deuteronomic
law. /1/
*****************************************
I This variation gained entrance the more easily as Berith is used
in various applications, e.g:, of the capitulation, the terms of
which are imposed by the stronger on the weaker party: that the
contracting parties had equal rights was by no means involved in
the notion of the Berith. See the wavering of the notion in
Jeremiah xxxiv. 13-18.
*******************************************
After the solemn and far-reaching act by which Josiah introduced
this law, the notion of covenant-making between Jehovah and Israel
appears to have occupied the central position in religious thought:
it prevails in Deuteronomy, in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, in Isaiah xl.-lxvi.,
Leviticus xvii.-xxvi., and most of all in the Book of the Four
Covenants. The Babylonian exile no doubt helped, as the Assyrian
exile had previously done, to familiarise the Jewish mind with the
idea that the covenant depended on conditions, and might possibly be
dissolved.
XI.II.
XI.II.1. The tabernacle of David fell at last, and no king was born
to set it up again. The state suffered not a crisis, but
destruction. And the result was that such of the religious hopes
of the people as they still held fast, were no longer limited to
existing political conditions, but now took a freer flight, became
tinged with enthusiasm, and cast off all restrictions. In former
times there was always an enemy threatening in the background, a
danger really approaching, to give rise to the expectation of a
great conflagration, the materials for which had long been
collected in the nation itself: but after the exile fancy dealt
in general coalitions of God knows what peoples against the New
Jerusalem, vaticinations for which there was no ground whatever
in reality. /1/
******************************************
1 Ezekiel xxxviii. xxxix.; Isaiah lxvi. 18-24; Joel iv.;
Zechariah xii. xiv. In Isaiah v. 26, on the other hand, we must,
of course, read GWY, for GWYM, the singular instead of the plural.
*****************************************
In earlier times the national state as it had existed under David
was the goal of all wishes. Now a universal world empire was
erected in imagination, which was to lift up its head at Jerusalem
over the ruins of the heathen powers. Prophecy was no longer
tied to history, nor supported by it.
But the extravagant hopes now built on Jehovah were balanced on
the other side by sober and realisable aims which the course of
history presented. Those who waited for the consolation of
Israel were then confronted from the nature of their situation
with practical tasks. The old prophets were satisfied with
expressing their ideas, with criticising existing evils; as to
practical points they had nothing to say, the leadership of the
people was in other hands. But the old community being now gone
and its heads having fallen with it, the godly both had the power
and felt the obligation to place themselves at the head of the
Israel now to be anew created, after which they had long been
striving, and their faith in which was still unshaken. In former
times the nation had not been so seriously threatened as that its
continued existence, notwithstanding the dangerous crises it might
have to pass through, should ever cease to be regarded as natural,
as a thing of course. But now this was by no means a thing of
course, the danger was a pressing one that the Jewish exiles,
like the Samaritan exiles before them, would be absorbed by the
heathens among whom they dwelt. In that case the Messianic hopes
also would have lost their point of application, for, however true
it was that the realising of them was Jehovah's concern, the men must
still be there to whom they were to be fulfilled. Thus everything
depended on getting the sacred remnant safe across this danger, and
giving it so solid an organisation that it might survive the
storms and keep alive the expectation of the promise.
But in the eyes of those whose words had weight in the restoration
the old community, as it had existed formerly, was not in good
repute. They could not but allow Jehovah's sentence of
condemnation to be just which He had spoken by the mouth of His
servants and through the voice of history. The utterances of the
prophets, that fortresses and horses and men of war, that kings and
princes, cannot help, were called to mind and turned into practical
principles: the sole rule of Jehovah was to be carried out in earnest.
Circumstances favoured the design, and this was the great point.
As matters then were, the reconstitution of an actual state was
not to be thought of, the foreign rule would not admit of it (Ezra
iv. 19 seq.). What plan was to be taken, what materials to be
used for such a building as the times allowed? The prophetic
ideas would not serve as building stones; they were not
sufficiently practical. Then appeared the importance of
institutions, of traditional forms, for the conservation even of
the spiritual side of the religion.
The Jewish royal temple had early overshadowed the other
sanctuaries, and in the course of the seventh century they were
extinct or verging on extinction. Under the shelter of the
monarchy the priests of Jerusalem had grown great and had at last
attained, as against their professional brethren elsewhere, a
position of exclusive legitimacy. The weaker the state grew, the
deeper it sank from the fall of Josiah onwards, the higher became
the prestige of the temple in the eyes of the people, and the
greater and the more independent grew the power of its numerous
priesthood; how much more do we feel it in Jeremiah's time than in
that of Isaiah! This advance of the priesthood indicates unmistakably
the rise into prominence of the cultus in the seventh century,
a rise rather helped than hindered by the long reign of Manasseh,
evil as is the reputation of that reign. It shows itself not only
in the introduction of more luxurious materials, incense, for example,
but even more in the importance given to great and striking services,
e.g., the sacrifice of children, and the expiatory offering. Even
after the abolition of the horrid atrocities of Manasseh's time,
the bloody earnestness remained behind with which the performance
of divine service was gone about.
So closely was the cultus of Jerusalem interwoven with the
consciousness of the Jewish people, and so strongly had the
priesthood established their order, that after the collapse of the
kingdom the elements still survived here for the new formation of
a "congregation" answering to the circumstances and needs of the
time. Around the ruined sanctuary the community once more lifted
up its head (1Kings viii.; Haggai i. seq.; Zechariah i. seq.).
The usages and ordinances were, though everywhere changes in
detail, yet not created afresh. Whatever creating there was lay
in this, that these usages were bound together in a system and
made the instruments of restoring an organisation of "the remnant."
Ezekiel first pointed out the way which was suited for the time.
He is the connecting link between the prophets and the law. He
claims to be a prophet, and starts from prophetic ideas: but they
are not his own ideas, they are those of his predecessors which
he turns into dogmas. He is by nature a priest, and his peculiar
merit is that he enclosed the soul of prophecy in the body of a
community which was not political, but founded on the temple and
the cultus. The chapters xl.-xlviii. are the most important in
his book, and have been called by J. Orth, not incorrectly, the
key of the Old Testament.
Thus arose that artificial product, the sacred constitution of
Judaism. In the Priestly Code we have the picture of it in
detail. /1/
******************************************
1. It is not the case that the hierocracy is based on the
Priestly Code: that code was only introduced after the
hierocracy was already in existence, but helped, no doubt, to
consolidate and legalise it. The written law afterwards
undermined the rule of the priests; and the scriptures played
into the hands of the scribes and Pharisees. (Compare the case
of the Parsees and Sabians, and .)
******************************************
The distinction, drawn with such pains between the Mosaic
theocracy and the post-exilic hierocracy, is too fine. Theocracy
as a constitution is hierocracy. If Moses founded such a
constitution, he did it prophetically, with a view to circumstances
which only arose a thousand years after his day, .
Old Israel had not shrunk to a religious congregation, public life
was not quite absorbed in the service of the sanctuary; the high
priest and the dwelling of Jehovah were not the centre round which
all revolved . These great changes were
wrought by the destruction of the political existence first of
Samaria, then of Judah. In this way the people became "a kingdom
of priests and a holy nation," as we read in a Deuteronomistic
passage, Exodus xix. 6. If the divine rule was formerly a belief
supporting the natural ordinances of human society, it was now set
forth in visible form as a divine state, in an artificial sphere
peculiar to itself and transcending the ordinary life of the people.
The idea had formerly informed and possessed the natural body, but
now, in order that it might be thoroughly realised, it was to have
spiritual body of its own. There arose a material, external antithesis
of a sacred and profane; men's minds came to be full of this, and
it was their great endeavour to draw the line as sharply as possible
and to repress the natural sphere more and more. Holiness is the
ruling idea in Ezekiel, in Leviticus xvii.-xxvi., and in the Priestly
Code. The notion is a somewhat empty one, expressing rather what
a thing is not than what it is; at first it meant the same as divine,
but now it is used mainly in the sense of spiritual, priestly, as if
the divine could be distinguished from the worldly, the natural, by
outward visible marks of that kind.
The Mosaic theocracy, the residuum of a ruined state, is itself not
a state at all, but an unpolitical artificial product created in
spite of unfavourable circumstances by the impulse of an
ever-memorable energy: and foreign rule is its necessary
counterpart. In its nature it is intimately allied to the old
Catholic church, which was in fact its child. As a matter of taste
it may be objectionable to speak of the Jewish church, but as a
matter of history it is not inaccurate, and the name is perhaps
preferable to that of theocracy, which shelters such confusion of
ideas.
XI.II.2. The Mosaic theocracy appears to show an immense
retrogression. The law of Jehovah should denote what is
characteristic of His people over against the heathen. But
this certainly did not consist in the cultus of Israel: it would
be vain labour to seek in this and that slight variation between
the Hebrew and the Greek ritual a difference of principle between
them. The cultus is the heathen element in the Israelite religion--
the word heathen not being understood, of course, in an ignoble or
unworthy sense. If the Priestly Code makes the cultus the principal
thing, that appears to amount to a systematic decline into the
heathenism which the prophets incessantly combated and yet were
unable to eradicate. It will be readily acknowledged that at the
constitution of the new Jerusalem the prophetic impulses were
deflected by a previously existing natural tendency of the mass on
which they had to operate. Yet in every part of the legal worship
we see the most decided traces of their influence. We have seen to
what a large extent that worship is everywhere marked by a
centralising tendency. This tendency is not connected in the Priestly
Code with opposition to improper or foreign worship; yet it must be
interpreted as a polemical measure; and if it be regarded as an
axiom necessary in the Priestly Code from the nature of the case,
that is only saving that the demands of the prophets had prevailed
most completely in a field where they had the greatest obstacles to
contend with. Exclusive monolatry is by no means innate in the
cultus; it can only be deduced from considerations which are
foreign to the nature of the cultus: it is the antitype of strict
monotheism. The prohibition of images, too, in the worship of the
Deity, is not expressly insisted on, as in Deuteronomy, but is a
provision which is taken for granted; so little is this position
in danger of question that even doubtful and repugnant elements are
embodied in the worship and assimilated by it without hesitation.
The golden ephod, denounced by Isaiah, has become an insignificant
decoration of the high-priest: talismans, forbidden even by
Ezekiel, are allowed (Numbers xv. 37-41), but the object of them is
"that ye may look upon them and remember all the commandments of
Jehovah, and do them, and that ye follow not after your own heart
and your own eyes, after which ye used to go a whoring." The gross
idolatry, with which the expression znh is always connected in
other passages, is by this time out of the question: the heart
itself with its lawless motions is the strange God, whose service
is forbidden.
We may go further and say that by the cultus-legislation the
cultus is estranged from its own nature, and overthrown in its own
sphere. That is most unmistakably the case with regard to the
festivals. They have lost their reference to harvest and cattle,
and have become historical commemorations: they deny their
birth from nature, and celebrate the institution of supernatural
religion and the gracious acts of Jehovah therewith connected.
The broadly human, the indigenous element falls away, they receive
a statutory character and a significance limited to Israel.
They no longer draw down the Deity into human life on all important
occasions, to take part in its joys and its necessities: they are
not HUMAN ATTEMPTS with such naive means as are at command to please
the Deity and render Him favourable. They are removed from the
natural sphere, and made DIVINE MEANS OF GRACE, which Jehovah has
instituted in Israel as sacraments of the theocracy. The worshipper
no longer thinks that in his gift he is doing God a pleasure,
providing Him with an enjoyment: what pleases Him and is effectual
is only the strict observance of the rite. The sacrifices must be
offered exactly according to prescription: at the right place, at
the right time, by the right individuals, in the right way. They are
not based on the inner value of what is done, on the impulse arising
out of fresh occasions, but on the positive command of a will outside
the worshipper, which is not explained, and which prescribes every
particular. The bond between cultus and sensuality is severed:
no danger can arise of an admixture of impure immoral elements,
a danger which was always present in Hebrew antiquity. Worship no
longer springs from an inner impulse, it has come to be an
exercise of religiosity. It has no natural significance; its
significance is transcendental, incomparable, not to be defined;
the chief effect of it, which is always produced with certainty,
is atonement. For after the exile the consciousness of sin, called
forth by the rejection of the people from the face of Jehovah,
was to a certain extent permanent: even when the hard service of
Israel was accomplished and the wrath really blown over, it would
not disappear.
If then the value of the sacred offerings lay not in themselves
but in obedience to the commandments of God, the centre of gravity
of the cultus was removed from that exercise itself and
transferred to another field, that of morality. The consequence
was that sacrifices and gifts gave way to ascetic exerctses,
which were more strictly and more simply connected with morality.
Precepts given originally in reference to the consecration of the
priests for their religious functions were extended to the laity:
the observance of these laws of physical cleanliness was of much
more radical importance in Judaism than the great public cultus,
and led by the straightest road towards the theocratic ideal of
holiness and of universal priesthood. The whole of life was
compressed into a certain holy path; there was always a divine
command to be fulfilled, and by thinking of it a man kept himself
from following after the desires and lusts of his own heart.
On the other hand this private cultus, which constantly required
attention, kept alive and active the individual sense of sin.
The great pathologist of Judaism is quite right: in the Mosaic
theocracy the cultus became a pedagogic instrument of discipline.
It is estranged from the heart; its revival was due to old
custom, it would never have blossomed again of itself. It no
longer has its roots in childlike impulse, it is a dead work, in
spite of all the importance attached to it, nay, just because of
the anxious conscientiousness with which it was gone about. At
the restoration of Judaism the old usages were patched together in
a new system, which, however, only served as the form to preserve
something that was nobler in its nature, but could not have been
saved otherwise than in a narrow shell that stoutly resisted all
foreign influences. That heathenism in Israel against which the
prophets vainly protested was inwardly overcome by the law on
its own ground; and the cultus, after nature had been killed in
it, became the shield of supernaturalistic monotheism.
The end of the Prolegomena
ISRAEL
Reprinted from the "Encyclopaedia Britannica"
I S R A E L.
1. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATION.
According to the Book of Genesis, Israel was the brother of Edom,
and the cousin of Moab and Ammon. These four petty peoples,
which may be classed together as the Hebrew group, must at one
time have formed some sort of a unity and have passed through a
common history which resulted in their settlement in
south-eastern Palestine. The Israelites, or rather that section of
the Hebrew group which afterwards developed into Israel, appear at
first to have been the immediate neighbours of Edom, and to have
extended westwards towards the border of Egypt. As regards the
ethnological position of the Hebrews as a whole, tradition has it
that they had connexions not only with the Aramaeans of Osrhoene
(Nahor), but also with certain of the old half-Arab inhabitants of
the Sinaitic peninsula (Kenites, Amalek, Midian). To the Canaanites,
whose language they had adopted, their relation was that of foreign
conquerors and lords to a subject race (Gen. ix, 26).
Some fifteen centuries before our era a section of the Hebrew group
left its ancient seat in the extreme south of Palestine to occupy
the not distant pasture lands of Egypt (Goshen), where they
carried on their old calling, that of shepherds and goatherds.
Although settled within the territory of the Pharaohs,
and recognising their authority, they continued to retain all
their old characteristics,--their language, their patriarchal
institutions, their nomad habits of life.
But in course of time these foreign guests were subjected to
changed treatment. Forced labour was exacted of them for the
construction of new public works in Goshen, an exaction which was
felt to be an assault upon their freedom and honour, and which in
point of fact was fitted to take away all that was distinctive of
their nationality. But they had no remedy at hand, and had
submitted in despair, until Moses at last saw a favourable
opportunity of deliverance. Reminding his oppressed brethren
of the God of their fathers, and urging that their cause was His,
he taught them to regard self-assertion against the Egyptians as
an article of religion; and they became once more a united people
in a determination to seek refuge from oppression in the wilderness
which was the dwelling-place of their kindred and the seat of their
God. At a time when Egypt was scourged by a grievous plague, the
Hebrews broke up their settlement in Goshen one night in spring,
and directed their steps towards their old home again. According
to the accounts, the king had consented to the exodus, and latterly
had even forced it on, but it was none the less a secret flight.
To a not very numerous pastoral people such an undertaking
presented no great difficulty. Nevertheless its execution was not
to be carried out unimpeded. The Hebrews, compelled to abandon
the direct eastward road (Exod. xiii. 17, 18), turned towards
the south-west and encamped at last on the Egyptian shore of the
northern arm of the Red Sea, where they were overtaken by
Pharaoh's army. The situation was a critical one; but a high
wind during the night left the shallow sea so low that it became
possible to ford it. Moses eagerly accepted the suggestion, and
made the venture with success. The Egyptians, rushing after, came
up with them on the further shore, and a struggle ensued. But the
assailants fought at a disadvantage, the ground being ill suited
for their chariots and horsemen; they fell into confusion and
attempted a retreat. Meanwhile the wind had changed; the waters
returned, apd the pursuers were annihilated./1/
************************************
1. Exod. xvi. 21, 24, 25, 27, 30, 31. According to the Old
Testament the exodus took place 480 years before the building of
Solomon's temple, and 960 years before the end of the Babylonian
captivity. These figures are "systematic" or at least
systematised, but even so they are certainly more trustworthy
than the combinations of the Egyptologists.
************************************
After turning aside to visit Sinai as related in Exodus, the
emigrants settled at Kadesh, eastwards from Goshen, on the
southern borders of Palestine, /2/
***********************************
2. The site of Sinai (= Horeb?) hardly admits of ascertainment.
The best datum would be the sanctuary of Jethro, if we could
identify it with Midian (Jakut, iv. 451), which lies
on the Arabian coast of the Red Sea obliquely facing the
traditional Sinai. With regard to Qadesh, see Quarterly
Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund (1871), pp. 20, 21.
*************************************
where they remained for many years, having at the well of Kadesh
their sanctuary and judgment-seat only, while with their flocks
they ranged over an extensive tract. In all probability their
stay at Kadesh was no involuntary detention; rather was it this
locality they had more immediately had in view in setting out.
For a civilised community of from two to three millions such a
settlement would, of course, have been impossible; but it was
quite sufficient for the immediate requirements of the Goshen
shepherds, few in number as they were and inured to the life of
the desert. That attempts may have been made by them to obtain
possession of the more fertile country to the north is very likely;
but that from the outset they contemplated the conquest of the
whole of Palestine proper, and that it was only in expiation of
a fault that they were held back at the gate of the promised land
until the whole generation of the disobedient had died out, is not
historically probable.
We can assign a definite reason for their final departure from
Kadesh. In the district to the east of Jordan the (Canaanite)
Amorites had, sometime previously, driven the Ammonites from the
lower Jabbok and deprived the Moabites of all their territory to
the north of the Arnon; on the plateau opposite Jericho Heshbon
had become the capital of Sihon, the Amorite king. This sovereign
now set himself to subdue southern Moab also, and not without
success.
"Fire went out from Heshbon, flame from the stronghold of Sihon,
devoured the cities of Moab upon the heights of Arnon.
Woe to thee, O Moab! thou art undone, O people of Chemosh!"
From these straits the Moabites were rescued by their cousins,
the nomads of the wilderness of Kadesh. The Israelites came
forward on behalf of what was at once the common Hebrew cause
and their own particular interest; they took the field against
the Amorites, vanquished them in battle, and broke up the kingdom
of Sihon. The consequence was that the land to the south of the
Arnon remained in the undisputed possession of Moab, while the
victors themselves became masters of the territory immediately
to the north. Settled thus between Moab and Ammon their kinsmen,
the Israelites supplied the link that was wanting in the chain of
petty Hebrew nationalities established in the south of eastern
Palestine.
The army that went out against the Amorites from Kadesh was
certainly not exclusively composed of men who, or whose fathers,
had accomplished the passage of the Red Sea Israel was not a
formed nation when it left Egypt; and throughout the whole period
of its sojourn in the wilderness it continued to be in process of
growth. Instead of excluding the kindred elements which offered
themselves to it on its new soil, it received and assimilated them.
The life they had lived together under Moses had been the first
thing to awaken a feeling of solidarity among the tribes which
afterwards constituted the nation; whether they had previously
been a unity in any sense of the word is doubtful. On the other
hand, the basis of the unification of the tribes must certainly
have been laid before the conquest of Palestine proper; for with
that it broke up, though the memory of it continued. At the same
time it must not be supposed that all the twelve tribes already
existed side be side in Kadesh. The sons of the concubines of
Jacob--Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher--manifestly do not pertain
to Israel in the same sense as do those of Leah and Rachel;
probably they were late arrivals and of very mixed origin.
We know, besides, that Benjamin was not born until afterwards,
in Palestine. If this view be correct, Israel at first consisted
of seven tribes, of which one only, that of Joseph, traced its
descent to Rachel, though in point of numbers and physical strength
it was the equal of all the others together, while in intellectual
force it surpassed them. The remaining six were the sons of
Leah:--Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah; Issachar, Zebulon. They are
always enumerated in this order; the fact that the last two are
also invariably mentioned apart from the rest and after Joseph
has its explanation in geographical considerations.
The time of Moses is invariably regarded as the properly creative
period in Israel's history, and on that account also as giving
the pattern and norm for the ages which followed. In point of
fact the history of Israel must be held to have begun then, and
the foundations of a new epoch to have been laid. The prophets
who came after gave, it is true, greater distinctness to the peculiar
character of the nation, but they did not make it; on the contrary,
it made them. Again, it is true that the movement which
resulted in the establishment of the monarchy brought together
for the first time into organic unity the elements which
previously had existed only in an isolated condition; but
Israel's sense of national personality was a thing of much earlier
origin, which even in the time of the judges bound the
various tribes and families together, and must have had a great
hold on the mind of the nation, although there was no formal and
binding constitution to give it support. When the Israelites
settled in Palestine they found it inhabited by a population
superior to themselves both in numbers and in civilisation, which
they did not extirpate, but on the contrary gradually subdued
and absorbed. The process was favoured by affinity of race
and similarity of speech; but, however far it went, it never had
the effect of making Israelites Canaanites; on the contrary, it
made Canaanites Israelites. Notwithstanding their inferiority,
numerical and otherwise, they maintained their individuality,
and that without the support of any external organisation.
Thus a certain inner unity actually subsisted long before it
had found any outward political expression; it goes back to
the time of Moses, who is to be regarded as its author.
The foundation upon which, at all periods, Israel's sense of its
national unity rested was religious in its character. It was the
faith which may be summed up in the formula, Jehovah is the God
of Israel, and Israel is the people of Jehovah. Moses was not the
first discoverer of this faith, but it was through him that it
came to be the fundamental basis of the national existence and
history. /1/
*****************************************
1. Jehovah is to be regarded as having originally been a family
or tribal god, either of the family to which Moses belonged or of
the tribe of Joseph, in the possession of which we find the ark of
Jehovah, and within which occurs the earliest certain instance of
a composite proper name with the word Jehovah for one of its
elements (Jeho-shua, Joshua). No essential distinction was felt to
exist between Jehovah and El, any more than between Asshur and
El; Jehovah was only a special name of El which had become
current within a powerful circle, and which on that account was
all the more fitted to become the designation of a national god.
****************************************
The exigencies of their position severe a number of kindred clans
from their customary surroundings, and drove them into his arms.
He undertook the responsibilities of their leader, and the
confidence of success which he manifested was justified by the
result. But it was not through any merit of his that the
undertaking (of which he was the soul) prospered as it did; his
design was aided in a wholly unlooked-for way, by a marvellous
occurrence quite beyond his control, and which no sagacity could
possibly have foreseen. One whom the wind and sea obeyed had
given him His aid. Behind him stood One higher than he, whose
spirit wrought in him and whose arm wrought for him,--not for his
personal aggrandisement indeed, but for the weal of the nation.
It was Jehovah. Alike what was done by the deliberate purpose of
Moses and what was done without any human contrivance by nature
and by accident came to be regarded in one great totality as the
doing of Jehovah for Israel. Jehovah it was who had directed each
step in that process through which these so diverse elements,
brought together by the pressure of necessity, had been caused to
pass, and in the course of which the first beginnings of a feeling
of national unity had been made to grow.
This feeling Moses was the first to elicit; he it was also who
maintained it in life and cherished its growth. The extraordinary
set of circumstances which had first occasioned the new national
movement continued to subsist, though in a less degree, throughout
the sojourn of the people in the wilderness, and it was under
their pressure that Israel continued to be moulded. To Moses, who
had been the means of so brilliantly helping out of their first
straits the Hebrews who had accompanied him out of Egypt, they
naturally turned in all subsequent difficulties; before him they
brought all affairs with which they were not themselves able to
cope. The authority which his antecedents had secured for him
made him as matter of course the great national "Kadhi" in the
wilderness. Equally as matter of course did he exercise his
judicial functions, neither in his own interest nor in his own
name, but in the interest of the whole community and in the name
of Jehovah. By connecting them with the sanctuary of Jehovah,
which stood at the well of Kadesh, he made these functions
independent of his person, and thus he laid a firm basis for a
consuetudinary law and became the originator of the Torah in
Israel. In doing this he succeeded in inspiring the national
being with that which was the very life of his own soul; through
the Torah he gave a definite positive expression to their sense
of nationality and their idea of God. Jehovah was not merely
the God of Israel; as such he was the God at once of law and
of justice, the basis, the informing principle, and the implied
postulate of their national consciousness.
The relationship was carried on in precisely the same manner as
that in which it had been begun. It was most especially in the
graver moments of its history that Israel awoke to full
consciousness of itself and of Jehovah. Now, at that time and
for centuries afterwards, the highwater marks of history were
indicated by the wars it recorded. The name "Israel" means
"El does battle," and Jehovah was the warrior El, after whom the
nation styled itself. The camp was, so to speak, at once the
cradle in which the nation was nursed and the smithy in which it
was welded into unity; it was also the primitive sanctuary.
There Israel was, and there was Jehovah. If in times of peace the
relations between the two had become dormant, they were at once
called forth into fullest activity when the alarm of danger was
raised; Israel's awakening was always preceded by the awakening
of Jehovah. Jehovah awakened men who under the guidance of His
spirit placed themselves at the nation's head; in them His proper
leadership was visibly expressed. Jehovah went forth with the
host to battle, and in its enthusiasm His presence was seen
(Judges. v. 13, 23). With signs and wonders from heaven Jehovah
decided the struggle carried on upon earth. In it He was always
upon Israel's side; on Israel was His whole interest concentrated,
although His power (for He was God) reached far beyond their local
limits.
Thus Jehovah was in a very real sense a living God; but the
manifestations of His life in the great crises of His people's
history were of necessity separated by considerable intervals
of time. His activity had something abrupt and tumultuary about
it, better suited for extraordinary occasions than for ordinary
daily life. Traces of this feeling appear very prominently in
the later stages of the development. But although the relations
between Israel and Israel's God came most strongly into
prominence in times of excitement, yet it did not altogether die
out in the periods of comparative repose. It was in the case of
Jehovah just as in the case of the human leaders of the people, who
did not in times of peace wholly lose the influence they had
gained in war. Jehovah had His permanent court at the places of
worship where in times of quietude men clung to Him that they
might not lose Him in times of trouble. His chief, perhaps in the
time of Moses His only, sanctuary was with the so-called ark of
the covenant. It was a standard, adapted primarily to the
requirements of a wandering and warlike life; brought back from
the field, it became, as symbol of Jehovah's presence, the central
seat of His worship. The cultus itself was more than a mere
paying of court to Jehovah, more than a mere expedient for
retaining His sympathies against times of necessity; the Torah of
Jehovah, the holy administration of law, was conjoined with it.
This had first of all been exercised, at the instance of the
priest of Midian, by Moses at the well of Kadesh; it was
continued after him, at the sanctuary, within the circle of those
who had attached themselves to him and were spiritually his heirs.
In cases where the wisdom or the competency of the ordinary
judges failed, men turned direct to the Godhead, i.e., to the
sanctuary and those who served it. Their decisions, whether
given according to their own lights or by lot (according to the
character of the question), were not derived from any law,
but were received direct from Jehovah. /1/
*****************************************
1 They were consulted chiefly on points of law, but also on all
sorts of difficulties as to what was right and to be done, or
wrong and to be avoided.
****************************************
The execution of their decisions did not lie with them; they
could only advise and teach. Their authority was divine, or,
as we should say, moral, in its character; it rested upon that
spontaneous recognition of the idea of right which, though
unexpressed, was alive and working among the tribes--upon Jehovah
Himself, who was the author of this generally diffused sense of
right, but revealed the proper determinations on points of detail
only to certain individuals. The priestly Torah was an entirely
unpolitical or rather prepolitical institution; it had an
existence before the state had, and it was one of the invisible
foundation pillars on which the state rested.
War and the administration of justice were regarded as matters
of religion before they became matters of obligation and civil
order; this is all that is really meant when a theocracy is
spoken of. Moses certainly organised no formal state, endowed
with specific holiness, upon the basis of the proposition "Jehovah
is the God of Israel;" or, at all events, if he did so, the fact
had not in the slightest degree any practical consequence or
historical significance. The old patriarchal system of families
and clans continued as before to be the ordinary constitution, if
one can apply such a word as constitution at all to an unorganised
conglomeration of homogeneous elements. What there was
of permanent official authority lay in the hands of the elders
and heads of houses; in time of war they commanded each his own
household force, and in peace they dispensed justice each within
his own circle. But this obviously imperfect and inefficient
form of government showed a growing tendency to break down just
in proportion to the magnitude of the tasks which the nation in
the course of its history was called upon to undertake. Appeal
to Jehovah was always in these circumstances resorted to; His
court was properly that of last resort, but the ordinary authorities
were so inadequate that it had often enough to be applied to.
Theocracy, if one may so say, arose as the complement of anarchy.
Actual and legal existence (in the modern sense) was predicable
only of each of the many clans; the unity of the nation was
realised in the first instance only through its religion. It was
out of the religion of Israel that the commonwealth of Israel
unfolded itself,--not a HOLY state, but THE state. And the state
continued to be, consciously, rooted in religion, which prevented
it from quitting or losing its rapport with the soil from which
it had originally sprung. With the intermediate and higher stages
of political organisation, with the building of the upper structure,
however, religion had no concern; they were too far removed from
the foundation. The derivative, which did not carry immediately
in itself its own title to exist, was a matter of indifference
to it; what had come into being it suffered to go its own way
as soon as it was capable of asserting its independence. For
this reason it always turned by preference to the future, not
in a utopian but in a thoroughly practical way; by a single
step only did it keep ahead of the present. It prepared the
way for such developments as are not derived from existing
institutions, but spring immediately from the depths in
which human society has its secret and mysterious roots.
The expression "Jehovah is the God of Israel," accordingly, meant
that every tosk of the nation, internal as well as external, was
conceived as holy. It certainly did not mean that the almighty
Creator of heaven and earth was conceived of as having first made
a covenant with this one people that by them He might be truly
known and worshipped. It was not as if Jehovah had originally
been regarded as the God of the universe who subsequently became
the God of Israel; on the contrary, He was primarily Israel's
God, and only afterwards (very long afterwards) did He come to
be regarded as the God of the universe. For Moses to have given
to the Israelites an "enlightened conception of God" would have
been to have given them a stone instead of bread; it is in the
highest degree probable that, with regard to the essential nature
of Jehovah, as distinct from His relation to men, he allowed them
to continue in the same way of thinking with their fathers. With
theoretical truths, which were not at all in demand, He did not
occupy himself, but purely with practical questions which were
put and urged by the pressure of the times. The religious
starting-point of the history of Israel was remarkable, not for
its novelty, but for its normal character. In all ancient
primitive peoples the relation in which God is conceived to stand
to the circumstances of the nation--in other words,
religion--furnishes a motive for law and morals; in the case of
none did it become so with such purity and power as in that of
the Israelites. Whatever Jehovah may have been conceived to be
in His essential nature-God of the thunderstorm or the like--this
fell more and more into the background as mysterious and
transcendental; the subject was not one for inquiry. All stress
was laid upon His activity within the world of mankind, whose ends
He made one with His own. Religion thus did not make men partakers
in a divine life, but contrariwise it made God a partaker in the
life of men; life in this way was not straitened by it, but enlarged.
The so-called "particularism" of Israel's idea of God was in fact
the real strength of Israel's religion; it thus escaped from barren
mythologisings, and became free to apply itself to the moral
tasks which are always given, and admit of being discharged, only
in definite spheres. As God of the nation, Jehovah became the God
of justice and of right; as God of justice and right, He came to
be thought of as the highest, and at last as the only, power in
heaven and earth.
*****
In the preceding sketch the attempt has been made to exhibit
Mosaism as it must be supposed to have existed on the assumption
that the history of Israel commenced with it, and that for
centuries it continued to be the ideal root out of which that
history continued to grow. This being assumed, we cannot treat
the legislative portion of the Pentateuch as a source from which
our knowledge of what Mosaism really was can be derived; for it
cannot in any sense be regarded as the starting-point of the
subsequent development. If it was the work of Moses, then we
must suppose it to have remained a dead letter for centuries,
and only through King Josiah and Ezra the scribe to have become
operative in the national history (compare sections 8 and 10).
The historical tradition which has reached us relating to the
period of the judges and of the kings of Israel is the main
source, though only of course in an indirect way, of our knowledge
of Mosaism. But within the Pentateuch itself also the historical
tradition about Moses (which admits of being distinguished, and
must carefully be separated, from the legislative, although the
latter often clothes itself in narrative form) is in its main
features manifestly trustworthy, and can only be explained as
resting on actual facts.
From the historical tradition, then, it is certain that Moses was
the founder of the Torah. But the legislative tradition cannot
tell us what were the positive contents of his Torah. In fact it
can be shown that throughout the whole of the older period the
Torah was no finished legislative code, but consisted entirely
of the oral decisions and instructions of the priests, as a whole
it was potential only; what actually existed were the individual
sentences given by the priesthood as they were asked for. Thus
Moses was not regarded as the promulgator once for all of a
national constitution, but rather as the first to call into
activity the actual sense for law and justice, and to begin the
series of oral decisions which were continued after him by the
priests. He was the founder of the nation out of which the Torah
and prophecy came as later growths. He laid the basis of
Israel's subsequent peculiar individuality, not by any one formal
act, but in virtue of his having throughout the whole of his long
life been the people's leader, judge, and centre of union.
A correct conception of the manner in which the Torah was made by
him can be derived from the narrative contained in Exod. xviii.,
but not from the long section which follows, relating to the
Sinaitic covenant (chap. xix. seq.). The giving of the law at
Sinai has only a formal, not to say dramatic, significance. It
is the product of the poetic necessity for such a representation
of the manner in which the people was constituted Jehovah's people
as should appeal directly and graphically to the imagination.
Only so can we justly interpret those expressions according to
which Jehovah with His own mouth thundered the ten commandments
down from the mountain to the people below, and afterwards for
forty days held a confidential conference with Moses alone on the
summit. For the sake of producing a solemn and vivid impression,
that is represented as having taken place in a single thrilling
moment which in reality occurred slowly and almost unobserved.
Why Sinai should have been chosen as the scene admits of ready
explanation. It was the Olympus of the Hebrew peoples, the earthly
seat of the Godhead, and as such it continued to be regarded by
the Israelites even after their settlement in Palestine (Judges
v. 4, 5). This immemorial sanctity of Sinai it was that led to
its being selected as the ideal scene of the giving of the law,
not conversely. If we eliminate from the historical narrative
the long Sinaitic section which has but a loose connection with it,
the wilderness of Kadesh becomes the locality of the preceding
and subsequent events. It was during the sojourn of many years
here that the organisation of the nation, in any historical sense,
took place. "There He made for them statute and ordinance, and
there He proved them," as we read in Exod. xv. 26 in a dislocated
poetical fragment. "Judgment and trial," "Massa and Meribah,"
point to Kadesh as the place referred to; there at all events is
the scene of the narrative immediately following (Exod. xvii. =
Num. xx.), and doubtless also of Exod. xviii.
If the legislation of the Pentateuch cease as a whole to be
regarded as an authentic source for our knowledge of what Mosaism
was, it becomes a somewhat precarious matter to make any
exception in favour of the Decalogue. In particular, the
following arguments against its authenticity must be taken into
account.
(1) According to Exod. xxxiv. the commandments which stood upon
the two tables were quite different.
(2) The prohibition of images was during the older period quite
unknown; Moses himself is said to have made a brazen serpent which
down to Hezekiah's time continued to be worshipped at Jerusalem as
an image of Jehovah.
(3) The essentially and necessarily national character of the older
phases of the religion of Jehovah completely disappears in the quite
universal code of morals which is given in the Decalogue as the
fundamental law of Israel; but the entire series of religious
personalities throughout the period of the judges and the kings--
from Deborah, who praised Jael's treacherous act of murder, to David,
who treated his prisoners of war with the utmost cruelty--make it
very difficult to believe that the religion of Israel was from
the outset one of a specifically moral character. The true spirit
of the old religion may be gathered much more truly from Judges v.
than from Exod. xx.
(4) It is extremely doubtful whether the actual monotheism which
is undoubtedly pre-supposed in the universal moral precepts of
the Decalogue could have formed the foundation of a national
religion. It was first developed out of the national religion at
the downfall of the nation, and thereupon kept its hold upon the
people in an artificial manner by means of the idea of a covenant
formed by the God of the universe with, in the first instance,
Israel alone (compare sections 6-10).
As for the question regarding the historical presuppositions of
Mosaism, there generally underlies it a misunderstanding arising
out of theological intellectualism-an attribute found with
special frequency among nontheologians. Moses gave no new idea
of God to his people. The question whence he could have derived
it therefore need not be raised. It could not possibly be worse
answered, however, than by a reference to his relations witb the
priestly caste of Egypt and their wisdom. It is not to be
believed that an Egyptian deity could inspire the Hebrews of
Goshen with courage for the struggle against the Egyptians, or
that an abstraction of esoteric speculation could become the
national deity of Israel. It is not inconceivable indeed,
although at the same time quite incapable of proof, that Moses
was indebted to the Egyptian priests for certain advantages of
personal culture, or that he borrowed from them on all hands in
external details of organisation or in matters of ritual. But
the origin of the germ which developed into Israel is not to be
sought for in Egypt, and Jehovah has nothing in common with the
colourless divinity of Penta-ur or with the God-forsaken dreariness
of certain modern Egyptologists. That monotheism must have been
a foreign importation, because it is contrary to that sexual
dualism of Godhead which is the fundamental characteristic of
Semitic religion, is an untenable exaggeration which has recently
become popular out of opposition to the familiar thesis about the
monotheistic instinct of the Semites (Noldeke, Literar.
Centralbl., 1877, p. 365). Moab, Ammon, and Edom, Israel's
nearest kinsfolk and neighbours, were monotheists in precisely
the same sense in which Israel itself was; but it would be foolish
surely in their case to think of foreign importation.
Manetho's statements about the Israelites are for the most part
to be regarded as malicious inventions: whether any genuine
tradition underlies them at all is a point much needing to be
investigated. The story of Exod. ii. 1 seq. is a mythus of
frequent recurrence elsewhere, to which no further significance is
attached, for that Moses was trained in all the wisdom of the
Egyptians is vouched for by no earlier authorities than Philo and
the New Testament. According to the Old Testament tradition his
connexion is with Jethro's priesthood or with that of the Kenites.
This historical presupposition of Mosaism has external evidence in
its favour, and is inherently quite probable.
*******
2. THE SETTLEMENT IN PALESTINE.
The kingdom of Sihon did not permanently suffice the Israelites,
and the disintegration of the Canaanites to the west of Jordan in
an endless number of kingdoms and cities invited attack. The
first essay was made by Judah in conjunction with Simeon and
Levi, but was far from prosperous. Simeon and Levi were
annihilated; Judah also, though successful in mastering the
mountain land to the west of the Dead Sea, was so only at the cost
of severe losses which were not again made up until the accession
of the Kenite families of the south (Caleb). As a consequence of
the secession of these tribes, a new division of the nation into
Israel and Judah took the place of that which had previously
subsisted between the families of Leah and Rachel; under Israel
were included all the tribes except Simeon, Levi, and Judah,
which three are no longer mentioned in Judges v., where all
the others are carefully and exhaustively enumerated. This
half-abortive first invasion of the west was followed by a second,
which was stronger and attended with much better results. It was
led by the tribe of Joseph, to which the others attached themselves,
Reuben and Gad only remaining behind in the old settlements.
The district to the north of Judah, inhabited afterwards by
Benjamin, was the first to be attacked. It was not until after
several towns of this district had one by one fallen into the
hands of the conquerors that the Canaanites set about a united
resistance. They were, however, decisively repulsed by Joshua
in the neighbourhood of Gibeon; and by this victory the Israelites
became masters of the whole central plateau of Palestine.
The first camp, at Gilgal, near the ford of Jordan, which had
been maintained until then, was now removed, and the ark of Jehovah
brought further inland (perhaps by way of Bethel) to Shiloh, where
henceforward the headquarters were fixed, in a position which
seemed as if it had been expressly made to favour attacks upon
the fertile tract Iying beneath it on the north. The Bne Rachel
now occupied the new territory which up to that time had been
acquired,--Benjamin, in immediate contiguity with the frontier
of Judah, then Ephraim, stretching to beyond Shiloh, and lastly
Manasseh, furthest to the north, as far as to the plain of Jezreel.
The centre of gravity, so to speak, already lay in Ephraim,
to which belonged Joshua and that is mentioned as the last
achievement of Joshua that at the waters of Merom he defeated
Jabin, king of Hazor, and the allied princes of Galilee, thereby
opening up the north for Israelitish settlers. It is quite what
we should expect that a great and united blow had to be struck
at the Canaanites of the north before the new comers could occupy
it in peace; and King Jabin, who reappears at a later date,
certainly does not suit the situation described in Judges iv. v.
*******
The Book of Joshua represents the conquest of western Palestine as
having been the common undertaking of all the tribes together,
which, after the original inhabitants have been extirpated, are
exhibited as laying the ownerless country at Joshua's feet in
order that he may divide it by lot amongst them. But this is a
"systematic" generalisation, contradicted by the facts which we
otherwise know. For we possess another account of the conquest of
Palestine, that of Judges i., which runs parallel with the Book of
Joshua. It is shorter indeed and more superficial, yet in its
entire mode of presenting the subject more historical. According
to its narrative, it appears that Joshua was the leader of Joseph
and Benjamin only, with whom indeed Issachar, Zebulon, Dan,
Naphtali, and Asher made common cause. But before his time the
tribe of Judah had already crossed the Jordan and effected a
lodgment in the territory which lay between the earlier seat of
the nation in the wilderness of Kadesh and its then settlement on
the plateau of Moab, forming in some degree a link of connection
between the two. It might be supposed that the tribe of Judah had
not taken the longer route to the eastward of the Dead Sea at
all, but had already at Kadesh broken off from the main body and
thence turned its steps directly northward. But the representation
actually given in Judges i., to the effect that it was from the
direction of the Jordan and not from that of the Negeb that they
came to take possession of their land, finds its confirmation
in the fact that the southern portion of their territory was
the last to come into their possession. The tradition is
unwavering that Hebron was taken not by Judah but by Caleb,
a family which stood in friendly relations with Israel, but had
no connexion with it by blood. It was only through the policy
of David that Caleb, Othniel, Jerachmeel, and the rest of the
Kenites who had their homes in the Negeb became completely
incorporated with Judah, so that Hebron became at last the capital
of that tribe. Its oldest seats, however, lay further to the
north, in the region of Tekoa, Bethlehem, Baal Judah.
It harmonises well with this view to suppose that Simeon
and Levi must have made at the same time their attempt to
effect a settlement in the hill country of Ephraim. One
of their families, Dinah bath Leah, met with a favourable
reception in the town of Shechem, and began to mix freely with
its population, and thus the way was paved for the establishment
of peaceable relations between the old inhabitants of the land
and the new importations. But these relations were brought to
an end by the two brothers who, in concert it must be supposed
with their sister, fell upon the Shechemites and massacred
them. The final result proved disastrous. The Canaanites
of the surrounding country united against them and completely
destroyed them. There can be no doubt as to the trustworthiness
of the somewhat enigmatical records of those events which are
given in Gen. xlix. and xxxiv.; in no other way is it possible
to explain why Simeon and Levi, which originally came upon the
stage of history on an equal footing with Reuben and Judah, should
have already disappeared as independent tribes at the very
beginning of the period of the judges. Now, that the destruction
of Shechem by the Manassite Abimelech is quite distinct from the
attack made by Simeon and Levi need hardly be said. On the
other hand, the occurrence cannot be regarded as pre-Mosaic, but
must be assigned to a time previous to the conquest of the hill
country of Ephraim by Joseph; for after Joseph's settlement
there the two sons of Leah had manifestly nothing more to hope
for in that locality. We are shut up, therefore, to the
conclusion that they crossed the Jordan at the same time as Judah
separated himself from the main body in search of a suitable
territory. That Simeon accompanied Judah in the first westward
attempt is expressly stated in Judges i. The fate of Levi,
again, cannot be separated from that of Simeon (Gen. xlix. 5-7);
that he is not expressly mentioned in Judges i. ought not to
cause surprise, when it is considered that later generations which
regarded Levi as neither more nor less than a priest would have
some difficulty in representing him as a thoroughly secular
tribe. Such nevertheless he must have been, for the poet in Genesis
xlix. 5-7 puts him on a footing of perfect equality with Simeon,
and attributes to both brothers a very secular and bloodthirsty
character; he has no conception that Levi has a sacred vocation
which is the reason of the dispersion of the tribe; the
dispersion, on the contrary, is regarded as a curse and no
blessing, an annihilation and not the means of giving permanence
to its tribal individuality. The shattered remains of Simeon,
and doubtless those of Levi also, became incorporated with Judah,
which thenceforward was the sole representative of the three sons
of Leah, who according to the genealogy had been born immediately
after Reuben the first-born. Judah itself seems at the same time
to have suffered severely. Of its three older branches, Er, Onan,
and Shelah, one only survived, and only by the accession of
foreign elements did the tribe regain its vigour,--by the fresh
blood which the Kenites of the Negeb brought. For Zarah and
Pharez, which took the place of Er and Onan after these had
disappeared, belonged originally, not to Israel, but to Hezron or
the Kenites; under this designation are included families like
those of Othniel, Jerachmeel, and Caleb, and, as has been already
remarked, even in David's time these were not reckoned as strictly
belonging to Judah. Thus the depletion which the tribe had to
suffer in the struggle with the Canaanites at the beginning of the
period of the judges was the remote cause of the prominence which,
according to 1Chronicles ii., the Bne Hezron afterwards attained in
Judah. The survivors of Simeon also appear to have been forced
back upon these Hezronites in the Negeb; the cities assigned to
them in the Book of Joshua all belong to that region.
*******
Even after the united resistance of the Canaanites had been broken,
each individual community had still enough to do before it could
take firm hold of the spot which it had searched out for itself or
to which it had been assigned. The business of effecting permanent
settlement was just a continuation of the former struggle, only
on a diminished scale; every tribe and every family now fought
for its own land after the preliminary work had been accomplished
by a united effort. Naturally, therefore, the conquest was at first
but an incomplete one. The plain which fringed the coast was
hardly touched; so also the valley of Jezreel with its girdle
of fortified cities stretching from Acco to Bethshean. All that
was subdued in the strict sense of that word was the mountainous
land, particularly the southern hill country of "Mount Ephraim;"
yet, even here the Canaanites retained possession of not a few
cities, such as Jebus, Shechem, Thebez. It was only after the
lapse of centuries that all the lacunae were filled up, and the
Canaanite enclaves made tributary.
The Israelites had the extraordinarily disintegrated state of
the enemy to thank for the ease with which they had achieved
success. The first storm subsided comparatively soon, and
conquerors and conquered alike learned to accommodate themselves
to the new circumstances. Then the Canaanites once more collected
all their energies to strike a blow for freedom. Under the
hegemony of Sisera a great league was formed, and the plain of
Jezreel became the centre of the reorganised power which made
itself felt by its attacks both northwards and southwards. The
Israelites were strangely helpless; it was as if neither shield
nor spear could be found among their 40,000 fighting men. But at
last there came an impulse from above, and brought life and soul to
the unorganised mass; Deborah sent out the summons to the tribes,
Barak came forward as their leader against the kings of Canaan who
had assembled under Sisera's command by the brook of Kishon. The
cavalry of the enemy was unable to withstand the impetuous rush
of the army of Jehovah, and Sisera himself perished in the
flight. From that day the Canaanites, although many strong
towns continued to be held by them, never again raised their
heads.
After these occurrences some further changes of a fundamental
character took place in the relations of the tribes. The Danites
proved unable to hold against the forward pressure of the
Philistines their territory on the coast to the west of Benjamin
and Ephraim; they accordingly sought a new settlement, which was
found in the north at the foot of Hermon. In this way all the
secondary tribes westward of Jordan (Asher, Naphtali, Dan) came
to have their seats beside each other in the northern division
of the land. Eastward of Jordan, Reuben rapidly fell from his
old prominence, sharing the fate of his next eldest brethren
Simeon and Levi. When Eglon of Moab took Jericho, and laid
Benjamin under tribute, it is obvious that he must previously
have made himself master of Reuben's territory. This territory
became thenceforward a subject of constant dispute between Moab
and Israel; the efforts to recover it, however, did not proceed
from Reuben himself, but from Gad, a tribe which knew how to
assert itself with vigour against the enemies by which it was
surrounded. But if the Hebrews lost ground in the south, they
materially enlarged their borders in the north of the land
eastward of Jordan. Various Manassite families, finding their
holdings at home too small, crossed the Jordan and founded
colonies at Bashan and northern Gilead. Although this
colonisation, on account of the rivalry of the Aramaeans, who
were also pressing forward in this direction, was but
imperfectly successful, it nevertheless was of very great
importance, inasmuch as it seemed to give new strength to the bonds
that united the eastern with the western tribes. Not only was
Gilead not lost; it even became a very vigorous member of the
body politic. /1/
*****************************
1. It is probable that Manasseh's migration to the territory
eastward of Jordan took place from the west, and later than the
time of Moses. The older portions of the Hexateuch speak not of
two and a half but only of two trans-Jordanic tribes, and exclude
Manasseh; according to them the kingdom of Sihon alone was subdued
by Moses, not that of Og also, the latter, indeed, being a wholly
legendary personage. In the song of Deborah, Machir is reckoned
among the western tribes, and it was not until much later that
this became the designation of the Manassites eastward of Jordan.
It is also worth noticing that Jair's colonisation of northern
Gilead did not take place until the time of the judges (Judges x.
3 seq.), but is related also in Num. xxxii. 39-42.
*****************************
The times of agitation and insecurity which followed upon the
conquest of Palestine invited attacks by the eastern nomads, and
once more the Israelite peasantry showed all its old helplessness,
until at last the indignation of a Manassite of good family,
Gideon or Jerubbaal, was roused by the Midianites, who had
captured some of his brothers and put them to death. With his
family, that of Abiezer, he gave pursuit, and, overtaking the enemy
on the borders of the wilderness, inflicted on them such
chastisement as put an end to these incursions. His heroism
had consequences which reached far beyond the scope of his original
purpose. He became the champion of the peasantry against the
freebooters, of the cultivated land against the waste; social
respect and predominance were his rewards. In his native town
of Ophrah he kept up a great establishment, where also he built
a temple with an image of Jehovah overlaid with the gold which
he had taken from the Midianites. He transmitted to his sons
an authority, which was not limited to Abiezer and Manasseh
alone, but, however slightly and indirectly, extended over
Ephraim as well.
On the foundations laid by Gideon Abimelech his son sought to
establish a kingship over Israel, that is, over Ephraim and
Manasseh. The predominance, however, which had been naturally
accorded to his father in virtue of his personal merits, Abimelech
looked upon as a thing seized by force and to be maintained with
injustice; and in this way he soon destroyed those fair
beginnings out of which even at that time a kingdom might have
arisen within the house of Joseph. The one permanent fruit of his
activity was that Shechem was destroyed as a Canaanite city and
rebuilt for Israel. /1/
************************************
1. On the narratives contained in the Book of Judges see Bleek,
Einl. ins Alte Testament (4th ed.), 88-98, and especially the
sections on Barak and Sisera, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson, the Danite
migration, and the Benjamites of Gibeah (93-98).
***********************************
The most important change of the period of the judges went on
gradually and in silence. The old population of the country,
which, according to Deuteronomy, was to have been exterminated,
slowly became amalgamated with the new. In this way the
Israelites received a very important accession to their numbers.
In Deborah's time the fighting men of Israel numbered 40,000;
the tribe of Dan when it migrated to Laish, counted 600 warriors;
Gideon pursued the Midianites with 300. But in the reigns of Saul
and David we find a population reckoned by millions. The rapid
increase is to be accounted for by the incorporation of the
Canaanites.
At the same time the Hebrews learned to participate in the culture
of the Canaanites, and quietly entered into the enjoyment of the
labours of their predecessors. From the pastoral they advanced
to the agricultural stage; corn and wine, the olive and the fig,
with them are habitually spoken of as the necessaries of life.
It was not strange that this change in the manner of their
everyday life should be attended with certain consequences in
the sphere of religion also. It is inconceivable that the
Israelites should have brought with them out of the desert the
cultus they observed in the time of the kings (Exod. xxii. xxiii.
xxiv.), which throughout presupposed the fields and gardens of
Palestine; they borrowed it from the Canaanites. /1/
******************************
1. In the earliest case where the feast of the ingathering,
afterwards the chief feast of the Israelites, is mentioned, it is
celebrated by Canaanites of Shechem in honour of Baal (Judges ix.
27).
*****************************
This is confirmed by the fact that they took over from these the
"Bamoth" or "high places" also, notwithstanding the prohibition
in Deuteronomy xii.
It was natural enough that the Hebrews should also appropriate
the divinity worshipped by the Canaanite peasants as the giver
of their corn, wine, and oil, the Baal whom the Greeks identified
with Dionysus. The apostasy to Baal, on the part of the first
generation which had quitted the wilderness and adopted a settled
agricultural life, is attested alike by historical and prophetical
tradition. Doubtless Baal, as the god of the land of Canaan, and
Jehovah, as the God of the nation of Israel, were in the first
instance co-ordinated. /2/
*****************************
2. In Judges v. Jehovah retains his original abode in the
wilderness of Sinai, and only on occasions of necessity quits it
to come to Palestine.
****************************
But it was not to be expected that the divinity of the land
should permanently be different from the God of the dominant
people. In proportion as Israel identified itself with the
conquered territory, the divinities also were identified. Hence
arose a certain syncretism between Baal and Jehovah, which had not
been got over even in the time of the prophet Hosea. At the same
time the functions of Baal were more frequently transferred to
Jehovah than conversely. Canaan and Baal represented the female,
Israel and Jehovah the male, principle in this union.
Had the Israelites remained in the wilderness and in barbarism,
the historical development they subsequently reached would hardly
have been possible; their career would have been like that of
Amalek, or, at best, like those of Edom, Moab, and Ammon. Their
acceptance of civilisation was undoubtedly a step in the forward
direction; but as certainly did it also involve a peril. It
involved an overloading, as it were, of the system with materials
which it was incapable of assimilating at once. The material
tasks imposed threatened to destroy the religious basis of the
old national life. The offensive and defensive alliances
among the tribes gradually dissolved under the continuance of
peace; the subsequent occupation of the country dispersed those
whom the camp had united. The enthusiastic _elan_ with which the
conquest had been achieved gave way to the petty drudgery by which
the individual families, each in its own circle, had to accommodate
themselves to their new surroundings. Yet under the ashes the
embers were still aglow; and the course of history ever fanned
them anew into flame, bringing home to Israel the truths that man
does not live by bread alone, and that there are other things of
worth than those which Baal can bestow; it brought ever again
into the foreground the divineness of heroical self sacrifice of
the individual for the good of the nation.
3. THE FOUNDATION OF THE KINGDOM, AND THE FIRST THREE KINGS.
The Philistines were the means of arousing from their slumber
Israel and Jehovah. From their settlements by the sea on the
low-lying plain which skirts the mountains of Judah on the west,
they pressed northwards into the plain of Sharon, and thence into
the plain of Jezreel beyond, which is connected with that of
Sharon by the upland valley of Dothan. Here, having driven out
the Danites, they came into direct contact with the tribe of
Joseph, the chief bulwark of Israel, and a great battle took
place at Aphek, where the plain of Sharon merges into the valley
of Dothan. The Philistines were victorious and carried off as a
trophy the Israelite standard, the ark of Jehovah. Their further
conquests included, not only the plain of Jezreel and the hill
country bordering it on the south, but also the proper citadel
of the country, "Mount Ephraim." The old sanctuary at Shiloh
was destroyed by them; its temple of Jehovah thenceforward lay
in ruins. Their supremacy extended as far as to Benjamin; the
Philistines had a nec,ib in Gibeah. /1/
**************************
1. _nec,ib_ is an Aramaic word of uncertain meaning. In the name of
the town _Nec,ibin_ (Nisibis) it certainly seems to mean "pillars;"
according to 1Kings iv. 5 and xxii. 48 (where it is pointed
niccab), "governor", seems the best translation, and this is the
only rendering consistent with the expression in 1Samuel xiii. 3
("Jonathan slew the _necib_," &c.).
***************************
But the assertion that they had confiscated all weapons and
removed all smiths must be regarded as an unhistorical
exaggeration; under their regime at all events it was possible
for the messengers of a beleaguered city on the east of Jordan
to summon their countrymen in the west to their relief.
The shame of the Israelites under the reproach of Philistine
oppression led, in the first instance, to a widespread exaltation
of religious feeling. Troops of ecstatic enthusiasts showed
themselves here and there, and went about with musical
accompaniments in processions which often took the shape of wild
dances; even men of the most sedate temperament were sometimes
smitten with the contagion, and drawn into the charmed circle.
In such a phenomenon, occurring in the East, there was nothing
intrinsically strange; among the Canaanites, such "Nebiim"--for
so they were styled--had long been familiar, and they continued
to exist in the country after the old fashion, long after their
original character, so far as Israel was concerned, had been wholly
lost. The new thing at this juncture was that this spirit passed
over upon Israel, and that the best members of the community were
seized by it. It afforded an outlet for the suppressed excitement
of the nation.
The new-kindled zeal had for its object, not the abolition of Baal
worship, but resistance to the enemies of Israel. Religion and
patriotism were then identical. This spirit of the times was
understood by an old man, Samuel ben Elkanah, who lived at Ramah
in south-western Ephraim. He was not himself one of the Nebiim;
on the contrary, he was a seer of that old type which had for a
long time existed amongst the Hebrews much as we find it amongst
the Greeks or Arabs. Raised by his foreseeing talent to a
position of great prominence, he found opportunity to occupy
himself with other questions besides those which he was
professionally called on to answer. The national distress
weighed upon his heart; the neighbouring peoples had taught him to
recognise the advantages which are secured by the consolidation of
families and tribes into a kingdom. But Samuel's peculiar merit
lay, not in discovering what it was that the nation needed, but in
finding out the man who was capable of supplying that need.
Having come to know Saul ben Kish, a Benjamite of the town of
Gibeah, a man of gigantic form, and swift, enthusiastic nature, he
declared to him his destiny to become king over Israel.
Saul very soon had an opportunity for showing whether Samuel
had been a true seer or no. The city of Jabesh in Gilead was
besieged by the Ammonites, and the inhabitants declared
themselves ready to surrender should they fail in obtaining
speedy succour from their countrymen. Their messengers had
passed through all Israel without meeting with anything more
helpful than pity, until at last tidings of their case reached
Saul as he was returning with a yoke of oxen from the field.
Hewing his cattle in pieces, he caused the portions to be sent
in all directions, with the threat that so should it be done
with the oxen of every one who should refuse to help in relieving
Jabesh. The people obeyed the summons, fell suddenly one morning
upon the Ammonites, and delivered the beleaguered city.
Having thus found Saul the man for their need, they refused to
let him go. In Gilgal, Joshua's old camp, they anointed him king.
The act was equivalent to imposing upon him the conduct of the
struggle against the Philistines, and so he understood it. The
first signal for the attack was given by his son Jonathan, when
he slew the _necib_ of the Philistines at Gibeah. These in
consequence advanced in force towards the focus of the revolt,
and took up a position opposite Gibeah on the north, being divided
from it only by the gorge of Michmash. Only a few hundred
Benjamites ventured to remain with Saul. The struggle opened
with a piece of genuine old heroic daring. While the Philistines
were dispersed over the country in foraging expeditions, Jonathan,
accompanied by his armour-bearer only, and without the knowledge
of Saul, made an attack upon the weak post which they had left
behind at the pass of Michmash. After the first had been
surprised and overmastered, the others took to flight, no doubt
in the belief that the two assailants were supported. They
carried their panic with them into the half-deserted camp, whence
it spread among the various foraging bands. The commotion was
observed from Gibeah opposite, and, without pausing to consult the
priestly oracle, King Saul determined to attack the camp. The
attempt was completely successful, but involved no more than the
camp and its stores; the Philistines themselves effected an
unmolested retreat by the difficult road of Bethhoron.
Saul was no mere raw stripling when he ascended the throne;
he already had a grown-up son at his side. Nor was he of
insignificant descent, the family to which he belonged being a
widespread one, and his heritage considerable. His establishment
at Gibeah was throughout his entire reign the nucleus of his
kingdom. The men on whom he could always reckon were his Benjamite
kinsmen. He recognised as belonging to him no other public
function besides that of war; the internal affairs of the country
he permitted to remain as they had been before his accession.
War was at once the business and the resource of the new kingdom.
It was carried on against the Philistines without interruption,
though for the most part not in the grand style but rather in a
series of border skirmishes. /1/
*********************************
1 As regards the position of Samuel in the theocracy and the
relation in which the stood to Saul, the several narratives in the
Book of Samuel differ widely. The preceding account, so far as it
relates to Samuel, is based upon 1Samuel ix., x. 1-15, xi., where
he appears simply as a Roeh at Ramah, and has nothing to do
either with the administration of the theocracy or with the
Nebiim. Compare Prolegomena above, chap. VII.
*********************************
It is not without significance that the warlike revival of the
nation proceeded from Benjamin. By the battle of Aphek Ephraim
had lost at once the hegemony and its symbols (the camp-sanctuary
at Shiloh, the ark of the covenant). The centre of Israel
gravitated southward, and Benjamin became the connecting link
between Ephraim and Judah. It would appear that there the tyranny
of the Philistines was not so much felt. Their attacks never were
made through Judah, but always came from the north; on the other
hand, people fled from them southwards, as is instanced by the
priests of Shiloh, who settled in Nob near Jerusalem. Through
Saul Judah entered definitely into the history of Israel; it
belonged to his kingdom, and it more than most others supplied him
with energetic and faithful supporters. His famous expedition
against the Amalekites had been undertaken purely in the
interests of Judah, for it only could possibly suffer from their
marauding hordes.
Among the men of Judah whom the war brought to Gibeah, David ben
Jesse of Bethlehem took a conspicuous place; his skill on the harp
brought him into close relations with the king. He became Saul's
armour-bearer, afterwards the most intimate friend of his son,
finally the husband of his daughter. While he was thus winning
the affections of the court, he at the same time became the
declared favourite of the people, the more so because unexampled
good fortune attended him in all he undertook. This excited the
jealousy of Saul, naturally enough in an age in which the king
always required to be the best man. Its first outburst admitted
of explanation as occasioned by an attack of illness; but soon
it became obtrusively clear that the king's love for his
son-in-law had changed into bitter hatred. Jonathan warned his
friend and facilitated his flight, the priests of Nob at the same
time providing him with arms and food. He went into the
wilderness of Judah, and became the leader of a miscellaneous band
of outlaws who had been attracted by his name to lead a roving life
under his leadership. His kinsmen from Bethlehem were of their
number, but also Philistines and Hittites. Out of this band David's
bodyguard subsequently grew, the nucleus of his army. They reckoned
also a priest among them, Abiathar ben Ahimelech ben Ahitub ben
Phinehas ben Eli, the solitary survivor of the massacre of the
sons of Eli at Nob which Saul had ordered on account of suspected
conspiracy with David. Through him David was able to have
recourse to the sacred lot before the ephod. In the end he found
it impossible to hold his own in Judah against Saul's
persecutions, especially as his countrymen for the most part
withheld their assistance. He therefore took the desperate step
of placing his services at the disposal of Achish the Philistine
king of Gath, by whom he was received with open arms, the town of
Ziklag being assigned him as a residence. Here with his band he
continued to follow his old manner of life as an independent
prince, subject only to an obligation to render military service
to Achish.
Meanwhile the Philistines had once more mustered their forces and
marched by the usual route against Israel. Saul did not allow
them to advance upon Gibeah, but awaited their attack in the plain
of Jezreel. A disastrous battle on Mount Gilboa ensued; after
seeing his three eldest sons fall one after another at his side,
Saul threw himself upon his sword, and was followed by his
armour-bearer. The defeat seemed to have undone the work of his
life. The immediate consequence at least was that the Philistines
regained their lost ascendancy over the country to the west of
Jordan. Beyond Jordan, however, Abner, the cousin and
generalissimo of Saul, made his son Ishbaal, still a minor, king
in Mahanaim, and he was successful in again establishing the
dominion of the house over Jezreel, Ephraim, and Benjamin,
of course in uninterrupted struggle with the Philistines.
But he did not regain hold of Judah. David seized the opportunity
to set up for himself, with the sanction of the Philistines, and,
it may safely be presumed, as their vassal, a separate
principality which had its centre of gravity in the south, which
was inhabited, not by the tribe of Judah properly so called, but
by the Calebites and Jerachmeelites. This territory Abner
disputed with him in vain. In the protracted feud between the
houses of Saul and David, the fortunes of war declared themselves
ever increasingly for the latter. Personal causes at last
brought matters to a crisis. Abner, by taking to himself a
concubine of Saul's called Rizpah, had roused Ishbaal's suspicions
that he was aiming at the inheritance, and was challenged on the
point. This proved too much for his patience, and forthwith he
abandoned the cause of his ward (the hopelessness of which had
already perhaps become apparent), and entered into negotiations
with David at Hebron. When about to set out on his return he fell
by the hand of Joab in the gate of Hebron, a victim of jealousy
and blood-feud. His plans nevertheless were realised. His death
left Israel leaderless and in great confusion; Ishbaal was personally
insignificant, and the people's homage continued to be rendered to
him only out of grateful fidelity to his father's memory. At
this juncture he also fell by assassins' hands. As he was
taking his midday rest, and even the portress had gone to sleep
over her task of cleaning wheat, two Benjamite captains introduced
themselves into his palace at Mahanaim and murdered him in the
vain hope of earning David's thanks. The elders of Israel no
longer hesitated about offering David the crown, which he accepted.
His residence was immediately transferred from Hebron to Jebus,
which until then had remained in possession of the Canaanites,
and first derives historical importance from him. It lay on the
border between Israel and Judah,--still within the territory of
Benjamin, but not far from Bethlehem; near also to Nob, the old
priestly city. David made it not only the political but also
the religious metropolis by transferring thither from
Kirjathjearim the ark of the covenant, which he placed within
his citadel on what afterwards became the temple hill.
Still the crown was far from being a merely honorary possession;
it involved heavy responsibilities, and doubtless what
contributed more than anything else to David's elevation to the
throne was the general recognition of the fact that he was the man
best fitted on the whole to overtake the labour it brought with
it, viz., the prosecution of the war with the Philistines, a war
which was as it were the forge in which the kingdom of Israel was
welded into one. The struggle began with the transference of the
seat of royalty to Jerusalem; unfortunately we possess only
scanty details as to its progress, hardly anything more indeed
than a few anecdotes about deeds of prowess by individual heroes.
The result was in the end that David completed what Saul had
begun, and broke for ever the Philistine yoke. This was
undoubtedly the greatest achievement of his reign.
From the defensive against the Philistines David proceeded to
aggressive war, in which he subjugated the three kinsfolk of
Israel,--Moab, Ammon, and Edom. He appears to have come into
conflict first with the Moabites, whom he vanquished and treated
with savage atrocity. Not long afterwards the king of Ammon died,
and David sent an embassy of condolence to Hanun his successor.
Hanun suspected in this a sinister design,--a suspicion we can
readily understand if David had already, as is probable,
subjugated Moab,--and with the utmost contumely sent back the
messengers to their master forthwith, at the same time making
preparations for war by entering into alliance with various
Syrian kings, and particularly with the powerful king of Soba /1/
**************************************
1. Soba appears to have been situated somewhat to the north of
Damascus, and to have bordered on the west with Hamath. The
Aramaeans were beginning even at that period to press westwards;
the Hittites, Phoenicians, and Israelites had common interests
against them. To the kingdom of Soba succeeded afterwards that
of Damascus.
*********************************
David took the initiative, and sent his army under command of Joab
against Rabbath-Ammon. The Syrians advanced to the relief of the
besieged city; but Joab divided his forces, and, leaving his
brother Abishai to hold the Ammonites in the town in check,
proceeded himself against the Syrians and repulsed them. On their
afterwards threatening to renew the attack in increased force,
David went against them in strength and defeated them at Helam
"on the river." It seems that as a result of this the kingdom of
Soba was broken up and made tributary to Damascus. Rabbath-Ammon
could not now hold out any longer, and the Ammonites shared the
fate of their Moabite brethren. Finally, Edom was about the same
time coerced and depopulated; and thus was fulfilled the vision of
Balaam,--the youngest of the four Hebrew nationalities trod the
three elder under his feet.
So far as external foes were concerned, David henceforward had
peace; but new dangers arose at home within his own family.
At once by ill-judged leniency and equally ill-timed severity
he had completely alienated his son Absalom, who, after Amnon's
death, was heir-apparent to the throne. Absalom organised a
revolt against his father, and to foster it availed himself of a
misunderstanding which had arisen between David and the men of
Judah, probably because they thought they were not treated with
sufficient favour. The revolt had its focus in Hebron;
Ahithophel, a man of Judah, was its soul; Amasa, also of Judah,
its arm; but the rest of Israel was also drawn into the
rebellion, and only the territory to the east of Jordan remained
faithful. Thither David betook himself with precipitancy, for
the outbreak had taken him completely by surprise. At Mahanaim,
which had once before been the centre from which the kingdom was
regained, he collected his faithful followers around him with his
600 Cherethites and Pelethites for a nucleus, Absalom against
Ahithophel's advice allowing him time for this. In the
neighbourbood of Mahanaim, in the wood of Ephraim, the decisive
blow was struck. Absalom fell, and with his death the rebellion
was at an end. It was Joseph that, in the first instance,
penitently sent a deputation to the king to bring him back. Judah,
on the other hand, continued to hold aloof. Ultimately a piece
of finesse on the king's part had the effect of bringing Judah
also to its allegiance, though at the cost of kindling such
jealousy between Israel and Judah that Sheba the Benjamite raised
a new revolt, this time of Israelites, which was soon, however,
repressed by Joab.
David seems to have died soon afterwards. His historical
importance is very great. Judah and Jerusalem were wholly his
creation, and, though the united kingdom of Israel founded by him
and Saul together soon fell to pieces, the recollection of it
nevertheless continued in all time to be proudly cherished by
the whole body of the people. His personal character has been
often treated with undue disparagement. For this we must chiefly
blame his canonisation by the later Jewish tradition which made a
Levitical saint of him and a pious hymn-writer. It then becomes a
strange inconsistency that he caused military prisoners to be
treated with barbarity, and the bastard sons of Saul to be hanged
up before the Lord in Gibeon. But if we take him as we find him,
an antique king in a barbarous age, our judgment of him will be
much more favourable. The most daring courage was combined in him
with tender susceptibility; even after he had ascended the throne
be continued to retain the charm of a pre-eminent and at the same
time child-like personality. Even his conduct in the affair of
Uriah is not by any means wholly to his discredit; not many
kings can be mentioned who would have shown repentance public and
deep such as he manifested at Nathan's rebuke. Least to his
credit was his weakness in relation to his sons and to Joab.
On the other hand, the testament attributed to him in 1Kings ii.
cannot be justly laid to his charge; it is the libel of a later
hand seeking to invest him with a fictitious glory. In like
manner it is unjust to hold him responsible for the deaths of
Abner and Amasa, or to attribute to him any conspiracy with
the hierocracy for the destruction of Saul, and thus to deprive
him of the authorship of the elegy in 2Samuel i, which certainly
was not the work of a hypocrite.
Solomon had already reached the throne, some time before his
father's death, not in virtue of hereditary right, but by palace
intrigue which had the support of the bodyguard of the Six
Hundred. His glory was not purchased on the battlefield. So far
was he from showing military capacity that he allowed a new
Syrian kingdom to arise at Damascus, a far more dangerous thing for
Israel than that of Soba which had been destroyed, and which it
succeeded. During this reign Edom also regained its independence,
nothing but the port of Elath remaining in Solomon's hands. As
regards Moab and Ammon we have no information; it is not
improbable that they also revolted. But if war was not Solomon's
forte, he certainly took much greater pains than either of his
predecessors in matters of internal administration; according to
tradition, the wisdom of the ruler and the judge was his special
"gift." Disregarding the tribal system, he divided his kingdom
into twelve provinces, over each of which he placed a royal
governor, thus making a beginning of vigorous and orderly
administration. /1/
**********************************
1. Very possibly the Canaanites, whose complete absorption falls
within this period, were an element that helped to loosen the
bonds of tribal unity, and consolidate a state in its place.
*********************************
Judah alone he exempted from this arrangement, as if to show
special favour. For his aim was less the advantage of his
subjects than the benefit of his exchequer, and the same object
appears in his horse traffic (1Kings ix. 19), his Ophir trade
(1Kings x. 11), and his cession of territory to Hiram (1Kings ix.
11). His passions were architecture, a gorgeous court, and the
harem, in which he sought to rival other Oriental kings, as for
example his Egyptian father-in-law. For this he required copious
means-forced labour, tribute in kind, and money. He had
especially at heart the extension and improvement of Jerusalem as
a strong and splendid capital; the temple which he built was only
a portion of his vast citadel, which included within its precincts
a number of private and public buildings designed for various
uses.
It is plain that new currents were introduced into the stream of
the nation's development by such a king as this. As formerly,
after the occupation, Canaanite culture had come in, so now, after
the establishment of the kingdom, the floodgate was open for the
admission of Oriental civilisation in a deeper and wider sense.
Whatever the personal motives which led to it may have been,
the results were very importent, and by no means disadvantageous
on the whole. On the basis of the firmer administration now
introduced, stability and order could rest; Judah had no cause
to regret its acceptance of this yoke. Closer intercourse with
foreign lands widened the intellectual horizon of the people,
and at the same time awakened it to a deeper sense of its own
peculiar individuality. If Solomon imported Phoenician and
Egyptian elements into the worship of Jehovah at his court
temple, the rigid old Israelite indeed might naturally
enough take offence (Exodus xx. 24-26), but the temple itself
nevertheless ultimately acquired a great and positive
importance for religion. It need not be denied that mischievous
consequences of various kinds slipped in along with the good.
The king, moreover, can hardly be blamed for his conduct in
erecting in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem altars to deities of
Ammon and Egypt. For those altars remained undisturbed until
the time of Josiah, although between Solomon and him there
reigned more than one pious king who would certainly have
destroyed them had he found them as offensive as did the author
of Deuteronomy.
4. FROM JEROBOAM I. TO JEROBOAM II.
After the death of Solomon the discontent which had been aroused by
his innovations, and especially by the rigour of his government,
openly showed itself against his successor; and when Rehoboam
curtly refused the demands which had been laid before him by an
assembly of the elders at Shechem, they withdrew from their
allegiance and summoned to be their king the Ephraimite Jeroboam
ben Nebat, who already had made an abortive attempt at revolt
from Solomon, and afterwards had taken refuge in Egypt. Only
Judah and Jerusalem remained faithful to the house of David.
Among the causes of the revolt of the ten tribes, jealousy of
Judah must certainly be reckoned as one. The power of Joseph had
been weakened by the Philistines, and by the establishment of the
monarchy the centre of gravity had been shifted from the north
where it naturally lay. But now it was restored to its old seat;
for once more it was situated, not in Judah, but in Joseph.
Monarchy itself, however, was not abolished by the revolting
tribes, conclusively showing how unavoidable and how advantageous
that institution was now felt to be; but at the same time they did
not refrain from attempts to combine its advantages with those
of anarchy, a folly which was ultimately the cause of their ruin.
As for their departure from the Mosaic cultus observed at
Jerusalem on the other hand, it was first alleged against them as
a sin only by the later Jews. At the time religion put no
obstacle in the way of their separation; on the contrary, it
actually suggested and promoted it (Ahijah of Shiloh). The
Jerusalem cultus had not yet come to be regarded as the alone
legitimate; that instituted by Jeroboam at Bethel and at Dan was
recognised as equally right; images of the Deity were exhibited
in all three places, and indeed in every place where a house of
God was found. So far as the religious and intellectual life of
the nation was concerned, there was no substantial difference
between the two kingdoms, except indeed in so far as new displays
of vigorous initiative generally proceeded from Israel. /1/
*************************************
1. Even in the Deuteronomic redaction of the Book of Kings indeed,
and still more by the Chronicler, the political rebellion of
Israel is regarded as having been ecclesiastical and religious in
its character. The Book of Chronicles regards Samaria as a
heathen kingdom, and recognises Judah alone as Israel. But in
point of fact Judah takes up the history of Israel only after
the fall of Samaria; see ## 6, 7.
************************************
Rehoboam did not readily accept the situation; he sought to
reduce the revolt by force of arms, with what degree of success
is shown by the fact that his rival found himself constrained to
take up his residence at Peniel (near Mahanaim) on the other side
of Jordan. The invasion of Shishak, however, who took Jerusalem
and burnt it, gave Jeroboam at last a breathing space. The feud
continued indeed, but Rehoboam could no longer dream of bringing
back the ten tribes. The scale by and by turned in Israel's
favour. King Baasha, who had seated himself on the throne in
place of Nadab, Jeroboam's son, took the offensive, and Asa ben
Rehoboam had no help for it but to call in Benhadad of Damascus
against his adversary. In this way he gained his immediate
purpose, it is true, but by the most dangerous of expedients.
Baasha's son Elah was supplanted by his vizier Zimri, who,
however, was in his turn unable to hold his own against Omri, who
had supreme command of the army. Against Omri there arose in
another part of the country a rival, Tibni ben Ginath, who
succeeded in maintaining some footing until his death, when Omri
became supreme. Omri must be regarded as the founder of the first
dynasty, in the proper sense of that word, in Israel, and as the
second founder of the kingdom itself, to which he gave a permanent
capital in Samaria. The Bible has hardly anything to tell us about
him, but his importance is evident from the fact that among the
Assyrians "the kingdom of Omri" / 1/
**********************************
1. Bit Humri, like )OIKOS *LUSANIOU, and similar territorial names
in Syriac.
*********************************
was the ordinary name of Israel. According to the inscription of
Mesha, it was he who again subjugated Moab, which had become
independent at the death of David or of Solomon. He was not so
successful against the Damascenes, to whom he had to concede
certain privileges in his own capital (1Kings xx. 34) /2/
**********************************
2. Omri's accession is to be placed somewhere about 900 B.C It is
a date, and the first, that can be determined with some precision,
if we place the battle of Karkar (854) near the end of Ahab's
reign, and take the servitude of Moab, which lasted forty years
and ended with Ahab's deatb, to begin in Omri's first decade.
**********************************
Ahab, who succeeded Omri his father, seems during the greater part
of his reign to have in some sort acknowledged Syrian suzerainty.
In no other way can we account for the fact that in the battle of
Karkar against the Assyrians (854 B.C.) a contingent was
contributed by him. But this very battle made the political
situation so clear that he was led to break off his relations with
Damascus. With this began a series of ferocious attacks on Israel
by Benhadad and Hazael. They were met by Ahab with courage
and success, but in the third year of that fifty years' war he
fell in the battle at Ramoth Gilead (c. 851).
*****
After the events recorded in 1Kings xx., a forced alliance with
Damascus on the part of Samaria is incredible; but the idea of
spontaneous friendly relations is also inadmissible. Schrader
indeed finds support for the latter theory in 1Kings xx. 34;
but in that passage there is no word of any offensive or defensive
alliance between the rival kings; all that is stated is that Ahab
releases the captive Benhadad on condition (BBRYT) that the latter
undertakes certain obligations, particularly those of keeping the
peace and restoring the cities which had been taken. By this
arrangement no change was made in the previously strained
relations of the two kingdoms; and, moreover, the BRYT was not
kept (xxii. 1 seq.). Not much nearer the truth than the
preceding is the view that the danger threatened by Assyria drove
the kings of Syria and Palestine into one another's arms, and so
occasioned an alliance between Ahab and Benhadad also. For if
feelings of hostility existed at all between the two last named,
then Ahab could not do otherwise than congratulate himself that
in the person of Shalmaneser II. there had arisen against
Benhadad an enemy who would be able to keep him effectually in
check. That Shalmaneser might prove dangerous to himself probably
did not at that time occur to him; but if it had he would still
have chosen the remote in preference to the immediately
threatening evil. For it was the political existence of Israel
that was at stake in the struggle with Damascus; in such
circumstances every ally would of course be welcome, every enemy
of the enemy would be hailed as a friend, and the political
wisdom which Max Duncker attributes to Ahab would have been
nothing less than unpardonable folly. The state of matters was at
the outset in this respect just what it continued to be throughout
the subsequent course of events; the Assyrian danger grew in
subsequent years, and with it grew the hostility between Damascus
and Samaria. This fact admits only of one explanation,--that the
Israelites utilised to the utmost of their power for their own
protection against the Syrians the difficulties into which the
latter were thrown by Shalmaneser II., and that these in their
turn, when the Assyrians gave them respite, were all the fiercer
in their revenge. On the evidence of the monuments and the Bible
we may even venture to assert that it was the Assyrian attacks upon
Damascus which at that time preserved Israel from becoming
Aramaic,--of course only because Israel made the most of them for
her political advantage.
Assuming that Ahab the Israelite (Ahabu Sirlaai) fought in the
battle of Karkar (854) on the side of the king of Damascus, it
was only because he could not help himself; but if it is actually
the case that he did so, the battle of Karkar must have taken
place BEFORE the events recorded in 1Kings xx.
****
The Moabites took advantage of an accession under such critical
circumstances to shake off the yoke imposed by Omri forty years
before; an accurate account of their success, obviously written
while the impression of it was still fresh, /1/ has come down to
*******************************
1. It is obvious that Mesha's narrative is to be taken with
2Kings i. 1, and not with 2Kings iii.
******************************
us in the famous inscription of King Mesha. Ahaziah, Ahab's
immediate successor, was obliged to accept the situation; after
his early death a futile attempt again to subjugate them was made
by his brother Joram. Such a campaign was possible to him only
in the event of the Syrians keeping quiet, and in point of fact
it would appear that they were not in a position to follow up the
advantage they had gained at Ramoth; doubtless they were
hampered by the inroads of the Assyrians in 850 and 849. As soon
as they got a little respite, however, they lost no time in
attacking Joram, driving him into his capital, where they
besieged him. Samaria had already been brought to the utmost
extremities of famine, when suddenly the enemy raised the siege
on account of a report of an invasion of their own land by the
"Egyptians and Hittites." Possibly we ought to understand by these
the Assyrians rather, who in 846 renewed their attacks upon Syria;
to ordinary people in Israel the Assyrians were an unknown quantity,
for which it would be natural in popular story to substitute something
more familiar. This turn of affairs relieved Joram from his straits;
it would even seem that, favoured by a change of dynasty at
Damascus, he had succeeded in taking from the Syrians the fortress
of Ramoth in Gilead, which had been the object of Ahab's
unsuccessful endeavours, when suddenly there burst upon the house
of Omri the overwhelming catastrophe for which the prophets had
long been preparing.
When the prophets first made their appearance, some time before the
beginning of the Philistine war, they were a novel phenomenon in
Israel; but in the interval they had become so naturalised that
they now had a recognised and essential place in connection with
the religion of Jehovah. They had in the process divested
themselves of much that had originally characterised them, but
they still retained their habit of appearing in companies and
living together in societies, and also that of wearing a peculiar
distinctive dress. These societies of theirs had no ulterior
aims; the rabbinical notion that they were schools and academies
in which the study of the Torah and of sacred history was pursued
imports later ideas into an earlier time. First-rate importance
on the whole cannot be claimed for the Nebiim, but occasionally
there arose amongst them a man in whom the spirit which was
cultivated within their circles may be said to have risen to the
explosive pitch. Historical influence was exercised at no time
save by these individuals, who rose above their order and even
placed themselves in opposition to it, but always at the same time
had their base of operations within it. The prototype of this
class of exceptional prophets, whom we not unjustly have been
accustomed to regard as the true, is Elijah of Thisbe, the
contemporary of Ahab.
ln compliment to Jezebel his wife, Ahab had set up in Samaria a
temple with richly endowed religious services in honour of the
Syrian Baal. In doing so he had no intention of renouncing
Jehovah; Jehovah continued to be the national God after whom he
named his sons Ahaziah and Jehoram. The destruction of Jehovah's
altars or the persecution of His prophets was not at all proposed,
or even the introduction of a foreign cultus elsewhere than in
Samaria. Jehovah's sovereignty over Israel being thus only
remotely if at all imperilled, the popular faith found nothing
specially offensive in a course of action which had been followed
a hundred years before by Solomon also. Elijah alone was strenuous
in his opposition; the masses did not understand him, and were far
from taking his side. To him only, but not to the nation, did it
seem like a halting between two opinions, an irreconcilable
inconsistency, that Jehovah should be worshipped as Israel's God
and a chapel to Baal should at the same time be erected in Israel.
In solitary grandeur did this prophet tower conspicuously over
his time; legend, and not history, could alone preserve the
memory of his figure. There remains a vague impression that with
him the development of Israel's conception of Jehovah entered upon
a new stadium, rather than any data from which it can be
ascertained wherein the contrast of the new with the old lay.
After Jehovah, acting more immediately within the political
sphere, had established the nation and kingdom, he now began in
the spiritual sphere to operate against the foreign elements, the
infusion of which previously had been permitted to go on almost
unchecked. /1/
******************************************
1. It is worth noticing how much more frequent from this period
onwards proper names compounded with the word Jehovah become.
Among the names of the judges and of the kings before Ahab in
Israel and Asa in Judah, not a single instance occurs;
thenceforward they become the rule.
******************************************
The Rechabites, who arose at that time, protested in their zeal
for Jehovah altogether against all civilisation which presupposes
agriculture, and in their fundamental principles aimed at a
recurrence to the primitive nomadic life of Israel in the
wilderness; the Nazarites abstained at least from wine, the chief
symbol of Dionysiac civilisation. In this indeed Elijah was not
with them; had he been so, he would doubtless have been
intelligible to the masses. But, comprehending as he did the
spirit from which these demonstrations proceeded, he thought of
Jehovah as a great principle which cannot coexist in the same
heart with Baal. To him first was it revealed that we have not
in the various departments of nature a variety of forces worthy
of our worship, but that there exists over all but one Holy One
and one Mighty One, who reveals Himself not in nature but in law
and righteousness in the world of man. The indignation he displayed
against the judicial murder at Jezreel was as genuine and strong
as that which he manifested against the worship of Baal in
Samaria; the one was as much a crime against Jehovah as the
other.
Elijah ascended to heaven before he had actually achieved much
in the world. The idea which his successors took from him was that
it was necessary to make a thorough clearance from Samaria of the
Baal worship and of the house of Ahab as well. For this practical
end Elisha made use of practical means. When Elijah, after the
murder of Naboth, had suddenly appeared before Ahab and
threatened him with a violent end, an officer of high command had
been present, Jehu ben Nimshi, and he had never forgotten the
incident. He now found himself at the head of the troops at
Ramoth Gilead after the withdrawal to Jezreel of Joram ben Ahab
from the field to be healed of his wound. To Elisha the moment
seemed a suitable one for giving to Jehu in Jehovah's name the
command now to carry out Elijah's threat against the house of
Ahab. Jehu gained over the captains of the army, and carried out
so well the task with which the prophet had commissioned him that
not a single survivor of Ahab's dynasty or of his court was left.
He next extirpated Baal and his worshippers in Samaria. From that
date no worship of foreign gods seems ever to have recurred in
Israel. Idolatry indeed continued to subsist, but the images,
stones, and trees, even the seraphim apparently, belonged to the
cultus of Jehovah, or were at least brought into relation with it.
Jehu founded the second and last dynasty of the kingdom of Samaria
His inheritance from the house of Omri included the task of
defending himself against the Syrians. The forces at his disposal
being insufficient for this, he resorted to the expedient of
seeking to urge the Assyrians to renew their hostilities against
the Arameeans. For this end his ambassadors carried presents to
Shalmaneser II.; these were not of a regular but only of an
occasional character, but the vanity of the great king represents
them as the tribute of a vassal. In the years 842 and 839 Assyrian
campaigns against Hazael of Damascus actually took place; then
they were intermitted for a long time, and the kings of Samaria,
Jehu and his two successors, were left to their own resources.
These were evil times for Israel. With a barbarity never
intermitted the frontier war went on in Gilead, where Ammon and
Moab showed themselves friendly to the Syrian cause (Amos i.);
occasionally great expeditions took place, one of which brought
King Hazael to the very walls of Jerusalem. It was only with
the greatest difficulty that Israel's independence was maintained.
Once more religion went hand in hand with the national cause;
the prophet Elisha was the main stay of the kings in the struggle
with the Syrians, "the chariot and horsemen of Israel." Joash ben
Joahaz ben Jehu at last succeeded in inflicting upon Syria several
blows which proved decisive. Thenceforward Israel had nothing to
fear from that quarter. Under Joash's son, Jeroboam II., the
kingdom even reached a height of external power which recalled the
times of David. Moab was again subdued; southwards the frontier
extended to the brook of the wilderness (Amos vi. 14), and northward
to Hamath.
5. GOD, THE WORLD, AND THE LIFE OF MEN IN OLD ISRAEL.
Before proceeding to consider the rise of those prophets who were
the makers of the new Israel, it will not be out of place here to
cast a glance backwards upon the old order of things which
perished with the kingdom of Samaria. With reference to any
period earlier than the century 850-750 B.C., we can hardly be
said to possess any statistics. For, while the facts of history
admit of being handed down with tolerable accuracy through a
considerable time, a contemporary literature is indispensable for
the description of standing conditions. But it was within this
period that Hebrew literature first flourished--after the Syrians
had been finally repulsed, it would seem. Writing of course had
been practiced from a much earlier period, but only in formal
instruments, mainly upon stone. At an early period also the
historical sense of the people developed itself in connection
with their religion; but it found its expression in songs, which
in the first instance were handed down by word of mouth only.
Literature began with the collection and writing out of those
songs; _the Book of the Wars of the Lord_ and _the Book of Jashar_
were the oldest historical books. The transition was next made to
the writing of prose history with the aid of legal documents and
family reminiscences; a large portion of this early
historiography has been preserved to us in the Books of Judges,
Samuel, and Kings. Contemporaneously also certain collections of
laws and decisions of the priests, of which we have an example in
Exodus xxi. xxii., were committed to writing. Somewhat later,
perhaps, the legends about the patriarchs and primitive times,
the origin of which cannot be assigned to a very early date, /1/
*****************************************
1. Even the Jehovistic narratives about the patriarchs belong
to the time when Israel had already become a powerful kingdom;
Moab, Ammon,, and Edom had been subjugated (Genesis xxvii. 29),
and vigorous frontier wars were being carried on with the Syrians
about Gilead (Genesis xxxi. 52). In Genesis xxvii. 40
allusion is made to the constantly repeated subjugations of Edom
by Judah, alternating with successful revolts on the part of the
former; see Delitzsch on K)$R;.
*************************************
received literary shape. Specially remarkable is the rise of
a written prophecy. The question why it was that Elijah and
Elisha committed nothing to writing, while Amos a hundred years
later is an author, hardly admits of any other answer than that
in the interval a non-literary had developed into a literary age.
How rapid the process was may be gathered from a comparison between
the singularly broken utterances of the earlier oracle contained
in Isaiah xv. xvi. with the orations of Isaiah himself.
We begin our survey with that of the family relations. Polygamy
was rare, monogamy the rule; but the right of concubinage was
unlimited. While a high position was accorded both by affection
and custom to the married wife, traces still existed of a state of
society in which she was regarded as property that went with the
inheritance. The marriage of relations was by no means
prohibited; no offence was taken at the circumstance that Abraham
was the husband of his sister (by a different mother). Parents
had full power over their children; they had the right to sell
and even to sacrifice them. In this respect, however, the
prevailing usage was mild, as also in regard to slaves, who
socially held a position of comparative equality with their
masters, and even enjoyed some measure of legal protection.
Slavery, it is plain, had not thc same political importance as
with the Greeks and Romans; it could have been abolished without
any shock to the foundations of the state.
Throughout this period agriculture and gardening continued to be
regarded as man's normal calling (Genesis iii. iv.); the laws
contained in Exod. xxi.-xxiii. rest entirely upon this
assumption. To dwell in peace under his vine and under his
fig-tree was the ideal of every genuine lsraelite. Only in a few
isolated districts, as in the country to the east of Jordan and
in portions of Judah, did the pastoral life predominate. Art and
industry were undeveloped, and were confined to the production of
simple domestic necessaries.
Commerce was in old time followed exclusively by the Canaanite
towns, so that the word "Canaanite" was used in the general sense
of "trader." But by and by Israel began to tread in Canaan's
footsteps (Hosea xii. 8, 9), /1/
****************************
1. "Canaan (i.e., Ephraim Canaanised) has deceitful balances in his
hand, and loves to overreach. Ephraim indeed saith, I am become
rich, I have gained weealth; but all his profits will not suffice
for (expiation of) the guilt which he has incurred."
****************************
The towns grew more influential than the country; money notably
increased; and the zeal of piety was quite unable to arrest the
progress of the change which set in. The kings themselves, from
Solomon onwards, were the first to set the bad example; they eagerly
sought to acquire suitable harbours, and in company or in competition
with the Syrians entered upon large commercial transactions.
The extortions of the corn-market, the formation of large estates,
the frequency of mortgages, all show that the small peasant
proprietorship was unable to hold its own against the accumulations
of wealth. The wage-receiving class increased, and cases in which
free Hebrews sold themselves into slavery were not rare.
On all hands the material progress of the commonwealth made itself
felt, the old simplicity of manners disappeared, and luxury
increased. Buildings of hewn stone began to be used even by
private individuals. The towns, especially the chief ones, were
fortified; and in time of war refuge was sought in them, and not
as formerly in woods and caves. Even in the time of David the
Israelites always fought on foot; but now horses and chariots were
regarded as indispensable. The bow came to be the principal weapon
of offence, and a military class appears to have sprung up.
The monarchy retained in the kingdom of the ten tribes its
military character; the commander-in-chief was the first person
in the kingdom. In internal affairs its interference was slight;
with systematic despotism it had little in common, although of
course within its narrow sphere it united executive and
legislative functions. It was little more than the greatest house
in Israel. The highest official was called "master of the
household." The court ultimately grew into a capital, the
municipal offices of which were held by royal officials. The
provinces had governors who, however, in time of war withdrew to
the capital (1Kings xx.); the presumption is that their sole
charge was collection of the revenue.
The state was not charged with affairs of internal administration;
all parties were left free to maintain their own interests. Only
in cases in which conflicts had emerged in consequence could the
king be approached. Ruling and judging were regarded as one and
the same; there was but one word for both (2Kings xv. 5).
Still, the king was not altogether the only judge; there were, in
fact, a number of independent jurisdictions. Wherever within a
particular circle the power lay, there the right of judging was
also found, whether exercised by heads of families and communities
or by warriors and powerful lords. It was only because the king
was the most powerful that he was regarded as the judge of last
resort; but it was equally permitted to apply to him from the first.
Of method and rule in these things there was but little; a man was
glad to find any court to receive his complaint. Of course without
complaint one got no justice. The administration of justice was at
best but a scanty supplement to the practice of self-help. The heir
of the murdered man would not forego the right of blood revenge; but
his family or the commune gave him aid, and in case of need took
his place, for bloodshed had at all hazards to be atoned for.
The firm establishment of civil order was rendered all the more
difficult by the continual wars and violent changes of dynasty
which ever and anon made its very existence problematical.
Power, which is more important than righteousness to a judicatory,
was what the government was wanting in In the simpler social
conditions of the earlier time a state which was adapted merely
for purposes of war might easily be found to work satisfactorily
enough, but a more complex order of things had now arisen. Social
problems had begun to crop up; for the poor and the proletariat
the protection of a thoughtful government had come to be required,
but was not forthcoming.
But these defects did not check all progress. The weakness of the
government, the want of political consolidation, were insufficient
to arrest intellectual advance or to corrupt the prevailing moral
tone and feeling for justice; in fact it was precisely in this
period (the period in which the main part of the Jehovistic
history must have been written) that the intellectual and moral
culture of the people stood at its highest. Even when the
machinery of the monarchy had got out of order, the organisation
of the families and communes continued to subsist; the smaller
circles of social life remained comparatively untouched by the
catastrophes that shook the greater. Above all, the national
religion supplied the spiritual life with an immovable basis.
The favourite illustrations of the power of religion in the Israel
of that period are drawn from the instances of great prophets who
raised kings out of the dust and smote them to it again. But the
influence and importance of these is generally exaggerated in the
accounts we have. That among them there occasionally occurred
manifestations of such power as to give a new turn in history is
indeed true; a figure like that of Elijah is no mere invention.
But such a man as he was a prophecy of the future rather than an
actual agent in shaping the present. On the whole, religion was
a peaceful influence, conserving rather than assailing the existing
order of things. The majority of the prophets were no revolutionists;
rather in fact were they always too much inclined to prophesy in
accordance with the wishes of the party in power. Besides, in
ordinary circumstances their influence was inferior to that of
the priests, who were servants of royalty at the chief
sanctuaries, but everywhere attached to the established order.
The Torah of Jehovah still continued to be their special charge.
It was not even now a code or law in our sense of the word;
Jehovah had not yet made His Testament; He was still living and
active in Israel. But the Torah appears during this period to
have withdrawn itself somewhat from the business of merely
pronouncing legal decisions and to have begun to move in a freer
field. It now consisted in teaching the knowledge of God, in
showing the right God-given way where men were not sure of
themselves. Many of the counsels of the priests had become a
common stock of moral convictions, which, indeed, were all of them
referred to Jehovah as their author, yet had ceased to be matters
of direct revelation. Nevertheless the Torah had still occupation
enough, the progressive life of the nation ever affording matter
for new questions.
Although in truth the Torah and the moral influence of Jehovah
upon the national life were things much weightier and much more
genuinely Israelitic than the cultus, yet this latter held on the
whole a higher place in public opinion. To the ordinary man it
was not moral but liturgical acts that seemed to be truly
religious. Altars of Jehovah occurred everywhere, with sacred
stones and trees--the latter either artificial (Asheras) or
natural--beside them; it was considered desirable also to have
water in the neighbourhood (brazen sea). In cases where a temple
stood before the altar it contained an ephod and teraphim, a kind
of images before which the lot was cast by the priest. Of the
old simplicity the cultus retained nothing; at the great
sanctuaries especially (Bethel, Gilgal, Beersheba) it had become
very elaborate. Its chief seasons were the agricultural
festivals--the passover, the feast of weeks, and most especially
the feast of the ingathering at the close of the year. These were
the only occasions of public worship properly so called, at which
every one was expected to attend; in other cases each worshipper
sought the presence of God only in special circumstances, as for
example at the beginning and at the end of particular undertakings.
The cultus, as to place, time, matter, and form, belonged almost
entirely to the inheritance which Israel had received from Canaan;
to distinguish what belonged to the worship of Jehovah from that
which belonged to Baal was no easy matter. /1/
******************************************
1. The description of the cultus by the Prophet Hosea shows this
very clearly. It is obvious enough, however, that the object
was to serve JEHOVAH, and not any foreign deity, by this worship.
*****************************************
It was the channel through which also paganism could and did ever
anew gain admittance into the worship of Jehovah. Yet that
publicity of the cultus which arose out of the very nature of Jehovah,
and in consequence of which the teraphim even were removed from the
houses to the temples, cannot but have acted as a corrective against
the most fatal excesses.
As for the substance of the national faith, it was summed up
principally in the proposition that Jehovah is the God of Israel.
But "God" was equivalent to "helper;" that was the meaning of
the word. "Help," assistance in all occasions of life,--that was
what Israel looked for from Jehovah, not "salvation" in the
theological sense. The forgiveness of sins was a matter of
subordinate importance; it was involved in the "help," and was a
matter not of faith but of experience. The relation between the
people and God was a natural one as that of son to father; it did
not rest upon observance of the conditions of a pact. But it was
not on that account always equally lively and hearty; Jehovah
was regarded as having varieties of mood. To secure and retain
His favour sacrifices were useful; by them prayer and
thanksgiving were seconded.
Another main article of faith was that Jehovah judges and
recompenses, not after death (then all men were thought to be
alike), but upon the earth. Here, however, but little account
was taken of the individual; over him the wheel of destiny
remorselessly rolled; his part was resignation and not hope.
Not in the career of the individual but in the fate of families
and nations did the righteousness of Jehovah find scope for its
manifestation; and this is the only reason why the religion
could dispense with the conceptions of heaven and hell. For the
rest, it was not always easy to bring the second article into
correlation with the first; in practice the latter received the
superior place.
It need hardly be said that superstition of every kind also
abounded. But the superstition of the Israelites had as little
real religious significance as had that poetical view of nature
which the Hebrews doubtless shared in greater or less degree with
all the other nations of antiquity.
6. THE FALL OF SAMARIA.
Under King Jeroboam II., two years before a great earthquake that
served ever after for a date to all who had experienced it, there
occurred at Bethel, the greatest and most conspicuous sanctuary
of Jehovah in Israel, a scene full of significance. The multitude
were assembled there with gifts and offerings for the observance
of a festival, when there stepped forward a man whose grim
seriousness interrupted the joy of the feast. It was a Judaean,
Amos of Tekoa, a shepherd from the wilderness bordering on the
Dead Sea. Into the midst of the joyful tones of the songs which
with harp and tabor were being sung at the sacred banquet he
brought the discordant note of the mourner's wail. For over all
the joyous stir of busy life his ear caught the sounds of death:
"the virgin of Israel is fallen, never more to rise;
lies prostrate in her own land with no one to lift her up."
He prophesied as close at hand the downfall of the kingdom which
just at that moment was rejoicing most in the consciousness of
power, and the deportation of the people to a far-off northern land.
There was something rotten in the state of Israel in spite of
the halcyon days it enjoyed under Jeroboam II. From the indirect
results of war, from changes in the tenure and in the culture of
the soil, from defective administration of justice, the humbler
classes had much to suffer; they found that the times were evil.
But it was not this that caused Amos to foresee the end of Israel,
not a mere vague foreboding of evil that forced him to leave his
flocks; the dark cloud that threatened on the horizon was plain
enough--the Assyrians. Once already at an earlier date they had
directed their course south-westwards, without, however, on that
occasion becoming a source of danger to the Israelites. But now
that the bulwark against the Assyrians, Aram of Damascus, was
falling into ruins, a movement of these against Lebanon in the time
of Jeroboam II. opened to Israel the alarming prospect that
sooner or later they would have to meet the full force of the
irresistible avalanche.
What then? The common man was in no position truly to estimate
the danger; and, so far as he apprehended it, he lived in the
firm faith that Jehovah would not abandon His people in their
straits. The governing classes prided themselves on the military
resources of Israel, or otherwise tried to dismiss from their
minds all thought of the gravity of the situation. But Amos heard
the question distinctly enough, and did not hesitate to answer
it: the downfall of Israel is imminent. It was nothing short of
blasphemy to utter anything of this kind, for everything, Jehovah
Himself included, depended on the existence of the nation. But
the most astounding thing has yet to come; not Asshur, but Jehovah
Himself, is bringing about the overthrow of Israel; through Asshur
it is Jehovah that is triumphing over Israel. A paradoxical
thought--as if the national God were to cut the ground from under
His own feet! For the faith in Jehovah as the God of Israel was
a faith that He intervenes on behalf of His people against all
enemies, against the whole World; precisely in times of danger
was religion shown by staying oneself upon this faith. Jehovah
might indeed, of course, hide His face for a time, but not
definitively; in the end He ever arose at last against all
opposing powers. "The day of the Lord" was an object of hope
in all times of difficulty and oppression; it was understood
as self-evident that the crisis would certainly end in favour of
Israel. Amos took up the popular conception of that day; but how
thoroughly did he change its meaning! "Woe to them who long
for the day of the Lord!--What to you is the day of the Lord,?
It is darkness, not light." His own opposition to the popular
conception is formulated in a paradox which he prefixes as theme
to the principal section of his book:--"Us alone does Jehovah
know," say the Israelites, drawing from this the inference that
He is on their side, and of course must take their part. "You
only do I know," Amos represents Jehovah as saying, "therefore do
I visit upon you all your sins."
If the question, Whereon did Jehovah's relation to Israel
ultimately rest? be asked, the answer, according to the popular
faith, must substantially be that it rested on the fact that
Jehovah was worshipped in Israel and not among the heathen, that
in Israel were His altars and His dwelling. His cultus was the
bond between Him and the nation; when therefore it was desired
to draw the bond still closer, the solemn services of religion
were redoubled. But to the conception of Amos Jehovah is no
judge capable of accepting a bribe; with the utmost indignation
he repudiates the notion that it is possible to influence
Him by gifts and offerings. Though Israel alone has served Him
he does not on that account apply any other standard to it than
to other nations (chaps. i. ii.). If Israel is better known to
Him, it does not follow that on that account He shuts His eyes and
blindly takes a side. Neither Jehovah nor His prophet recognises
two moral standards; right is everywhere right, wrong always
wrong, even though committed against Israel's worst enemies (ii. 1).
What Jehovah demands is righteousness,--nothing more and
nothing less; what He hates is injustice. Sin or offence to the
Deity is a thing of purely moral character; with such emphasis
this doctrine had never before been heard. Morality is that for
the sake of which all other things exist; it is the alone
essential thing in the world. It is no postulate, no idea, but at
once a necessity and a fact, the most intensely living of
personal powers-Jehovah the God of Hosts. In wrath, in ruin, this
holy reality makes its existence known; it annihilates all that
is hollow and false.
Amos calls Jehovah the God of Hosts, never the God of Israel.
The nation as such is no religious conception to him; from its mere
existence he cannot formulate any article of faith. Sometimes it
seems as if he were denying Israel's prerogative altogether. He
does not really do so, but at least the prerogative is
conditional and involves a heavy responsibility. The saying in
iii. 2 recalls Luke xii. 47. The proposition "Jehovah knows
Israel" is in the mouth of Amos almost the same thing as "Israel
knows Jehovah; " save only that this is not to be regarded as
any merit on Israel's part, but as a manifestation of the grace of
Jehovah, who has led His people by great deeds and holy men, and
so made Himself known. Amos knows no other truth than that
practical one which he has found among his own people and nowhere
else, Iying at the foundation of life and morality, and which he
regards as the product of a divine providential ordering of
history. From this point of view, so thoroughly Israelitish, he
pronounces Israel's condemnation. He starts from premisses
generally conceded, but he accentuates them differently and
draws from them divergent conclusions.
Amos was the founder, and the purest type, of a new phase of
prophecy. The impending conflict of Asshur with Jehovah and
Israel, the ultimate downfall of Israel, is its theme. Until that
date there had subsisted in Palestine and Syria a number of petty
kingdoms and nationalities, which had their friendships and
enmities with one another, but paid no heed to anything outside
their own immediate environment, and revolved, each on its own axis,
careless of the outside world, until suddenly the Assyrians burst
in upon them. These commenced the work which was carried on by
the Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks, and completed by the Romans.
They introduced a new factor, the conception of the world,--the world
of course in the historical sense of that expression. In presence
of that conception the petty nationalities lost their centre of
gravity, brute fact dispelled their illusions, they flung their
gods to the moles and to the bats (Isaiah ii.). The prophets of
Israel alone did not allow themselves to be taken by surprise by
what had occurred, or to be plunged in despair; they solved by
anticipation the grim problem which history set before them.
They absorbed into their religion that conception of the world
which was destroying the religions of the nations, even before it
had been fully grasped by the secular consciousness. Where
others saw only the ruin of everything that is holiest, they saw
the triumph of Jehovah over delusion and error. Whatever else
might be overthrown, the really worthy remained unshaken. They
recognised ideal powers only, right and wrong truth and falsehood;
second causes were matters of indifference to them, they were no
practical politicians. But they watched the course of events
attentively, nay, with passionate interest. The present, which
was passing before them, became to them as it were the plot of a
divine drama which they watched with an intelligence that
anticipated the _denouement_. Everywhere the same goal of the
development, everywhere the same laws. The nations are the
_dramatis personae_, Israel the hero, Jehovah the poet of the
tragedy. /1/
*****************************
1. In very much the same way the threatened and actual political
annihilation of Ionia led to the rise of Greek philosophy
(Xenophanes, Heraclitus).
*****************************
The canonical prophets, the series of whom begins with Amos, were
separated by an essential distinction from the class which had
preceded them and which still continued to be the type of the
common prophet. They did not seek to kindle either the
enthusiasm or the fanaticism of the multitude; they swam not
with but against the stream. They were not patriotic, at least
in the ordinary acceptation of that word; they prophesied not good
but evil for their people (Jer. xxviii. 8). Until their time
the nation had sprung up out of the conception of Jehovah; now
the conception of Jehovah was casting the nation into the shade.
The natural bond between the two was severed, and the relation
was henceforward viewed as conditional. As God of the
righteousness which is the law of the whole universe, Jehovah
could be Israel's God only in so far as in Israel the right was
recognised and followed. The ethical element destroyed the
national character of the old religion. It still addressed itself,
to be sure, more to the nation and to society at large than to
the individual; it insisted less upon a pure heart than upon
righteous institutions; but nevertheless the first step towards
universalism had been accomplished, towards at once the general
diffusion and the individualisation of religion. Thus, although
the prophets were far from originating a new conception of God,
they none the less were the founders of what has been called
"ethical monotheism." But with them this ethical monotheism was no
product of the "self-evolution of dogma," but a progressive step
which had been called forth simply by the course of events. The
providence of God brought it about that this call came at an
opportune period, and not too suddenly. The downfall of the nation
did not take place until the truths and precepts of religion were
already strong enough to be able to live on alone; to the
prophets belongs the merit of having recognised the independence
of these, and of having secured perpetuity to Israel by refusing
to allow the conception of Jehovah to be involved in the ruin of
the kingdom. They saved faith by destroying illusion.
The event which Amos had foreseen was not long in coming. The
Israelites flew spontaneously, like "silly doves," into the net
of the Assyrians. Zechariah ben Jeroboam was overthrown after a
short reign, Shallum his murderer and successor was also unable to
hold his own, and was followed after the horrors of a civil war by
Menahem ben Gadi (745 B.C). But Menahem, in the presence of
domestic (and perhaps also foreign) assailants, /1/ had no other
**********************************
1. It is not inconceivable that the wars carried on by
Tiglath-pileser II. against Hamath had some connection with his
interventions in favour of Menahem. The kingdom of Hamath, which
may have been threatened by Jeroboam II., may have availed
itself of the state of matters which followed his death to secure
its own aggrandisement at Israel's expense; in correspondence
with this attack from the northern side another by Judah in
concert with Hamath may well have been made from the south. In
this way, though not without the aid of pure hypothesis, it might
be possible to fit into the general historical connection the
fragmentary Assyrian notices about Azariah of Judah and his
relations to Hamath; the explanations suggested by the
Assyriologists have hitherto been total failures. But in that
case it would certainly be necessary to assume that the Assyrians
were badly informed as to the nature of the relations between
Hamath and Judah, and also as to the individual who at that time
held the throne of Judah. Uzziah (= Azariah), who in his old age
had become a leper, could only nominally at best have been king
of Judah then.
*************************************
resort than to purchase by payment of a great tribute the assistance
of King Tiglath-pileser II., who at that time was giving new force
to the Assyrian predominance in these regions. By such means he
succeeded in attaining his immediate end, but the further
consequence was that the rival party in the state turned for
support to Egypt, and Palestine now became the arena of conflict
between the two great world-powers.
Menahem transmitted his kingdom to Pekahiah; Pekahiah was murdered
about 735 B.C. by Pekah, and Pekah himself shortly afterwards
was overthrown. All this happened within a few years. It would
have been possible to conjecture the state of the country in
these circumstances, even if we had not been informed of it by
means of the prophetical book of Hosea, which dates from the time
when the Assyrians had begun indeed to tamper with the country,
but had not yet shown their full design. After the death of
Jeroboam II. there had been wild outbursts of partisan war; none
of the kings who in quick succession appeared and disappeared had
real power, none established order. It was as if the danger from
without, which was only too obviously threatening the existence
of the kingdom, had already dissolved all internal bonds; every
one was at war with his neighbour. Assyrians and Egyptians were
called in to support this or that government; by such expedients
the external confusion was, naturally, only increased. Was there
any other quarter in which help could yet be sought? The
people, led by the priests, turned to the altars of Jehovah, and
outdid itself in pious works, as if by any such illusory means,
out of all relation to the practical problem in hand, the gangrene
of anarchy could possibly be healed. Still more zealous than
Amos against the cultus was Hosea, not merely on the ground that
it had the absurd motive of forcing Jehovah's favour, but also
because it was of heathenish character, nature-worship and
idolatry. That Jehovah is the true and only helper is certainly
not denied by Hosea. But His help is coupled with the condition
that Israel shall undergo a complete change, and of such a change
he sees no prospect. On this account the downfall of the state is
in Hosea's view inevitable, but not final ruin, only such an
overthrow as is necessary for the transition to a new and fair
recommencement. In Hosea's prophecies the relation between Jehovah
and Israel is conceived of as dissoluble, and as actually on the point
of being dissolved, but it has struck its roots so deep that it
must inevitably at last establish itself again.
The first actual collision between Israel and Assyria occurred in
734. Resin, king of Damascus, and Pekah, king of Samaria, had
united in an expedition against Judah, where at that time Ahaz ben
Jotham occupied the throne. But Ahaz parried the blow by placing
himself under the protection of the Assyrians, who perhaps would
in any case have struck in against the alliance between Aram and
Israel. Tiglath-pileser made his first appearance in 734, first on
the sea-coast of Palestine, and subsequently either in this or in
the following year took up his quarters in the kingdom of the ten
tribes. After he had ravaged Galilee and Gilead, he finally
concluded a peace with Samaria conditionally on his receiving the
head of King Pekah and a considerable yearly tribute. Hosea ben
Elah was raised to the throne in Pekah's place and acknowledged by
the Assyrian as a vassal For some ten years he held his position
quietly, regularly paying his dues. But when at the death of
Tiglath-pileser the Syro-Palestinian kingdoms rebelled _en masse_,
Samaria also was seized with the delirium of patriotic fanaticism
(Isaiah xxviii.). Relying upon the help of Seve, king of Ethiopia
and Egypt, Hosea ventured on a revolt from Assyria. But the
Egyptians left him in the lurch as soon as Shalmaneser IV.,
Tiglath-pileser's successor, invaded his territory. Before his
capital had fallen, Hosea himself fell into the hands of the
Assyrians. Samaria offered a desperate resistance, and succumbed
only to Sargon, Shalmaneser's successor (72I). Energetic
measures were adopted by the victor for the pacification of the
country; he carried all the inhabitants of mark into captivity
to Calachene, Gozanitis, and Armenia. Much light is thrown upon
the conditions of the national religion then and upon its
subsequent development by the single fact that the exiled
Israelites were absorbed by the surrounding heathenism without
leaving a trace behind them, while the population of Judah, who
had the benefit of a hundred years respite, held their faith fast
throughout the period of the Babylonian exile, and by means of it
were able to maintain their own individuality afterwards in all
the circumstances that arose. The fact that the fall of Samaria
did not hinder but helped the religion of Jehovah is entirely due
to the prophets. That they had foreseen the downfall of the
state, and declared in the name of religion that it was
inevitable, was a matter of much greater historical importance
than the actual downfall itself.
7. THE DELIVERANCE OF JUDAH.
Hitherto the small kingdom of Judah had stood in the background.
Its political history had been determined almost exclusively by
its relation to Israel. Under the dynasty of Omri the original
enmity had been changed into a close but perhaps not quite
voluntary friendship. Judah found itself drawn completely into
the train of the more powerful neighbouring state, and seems even
to have rendered it military service. The fall of the house of
Omri was an ominous event for Judah as well as Israel; Jehu, as
he passed to the throne, put to death not only Ahaziah the king
but also two and forty other members of the royal house of David
who had fallen into his hands; and those who still survived,
children for the most part, were murdered wholesale by the regent
Athaliah for reasons that are unknown. Only one little boy,
Joash, was concealed from her fury, and by a successful
conspiracy six years afterwards was placed upon the throne of his
ancestors. At that time the Syrians were extending their
incursions to Judah and Philistia, and Joash bought them off from
Jerusalem with the temple treasures. Perhaps it was this disgrace
that he expiated with his death; in like manner perhaps the
assassination of his successor Amaziah is to be accounted for by
the discredit he had incurred by a reckless and unsuccessful war
against Israel. Just as Israel was beginning to recover itself
after the happy termination of the Syrian wars, Judah also
experienced its period of highest prosperity. What Jeroboam II.
was to the northern kingdom, Uzziah was to that of the south. He
appears to have obtained possession of Edom, and for a
considerable time to have held that one province of David's
conquests which fell to Judah; and at the trading port of Elath
he revived the commerce which Solomon had created. The prosperity
of his long reign was uninterrupted till in his later years he was
smitten with leprosy, and found it necessary to hand over the
affairs of the kingdom to his son Jotham. But Jotham appears to
have died about the same time as his father,--his successor, still
in very early youth (Isaiah iii. 12), being Ahaz ben Jotham
ben Uzziah.
If Judah could not compare with Israel in political and general
historical importance, it nevertheless enjoyed more than one
considerable advantage over the larger kingdom. It was much safer
from foreign foes; for the Egyptians, as a rule, were not
dangerous neighbours. But its chief advantage consisted in the
stability of its dynasty. It was David who had elevated Judah
and Jerusalem to a position of historical significance, and the
prosperity of his house was most intimately connected with that
of the town and territory, and even with that of religion. On two
separate occasions it occurred that a king of Judah was murdered
by subjects, but in both cases the "people of the land" rose up
against the assassins and once more placed a member of the Davidic
family upon the throne. The one actual recorded revolution was
that against Athaliah, which had for its object the restoration of
the throne to the legitimate heir. Under shelter of the monarchy
the other institutions of the state also acquired a measure of
permanency such as was not found at all in Israel, where
everything depended on the character of individuals, and the
existing order of things was ever liable to be subjected to fresh
dispute. Life in Judah was a much more stable affair, though not
so exciting or dramatic. Possibly the greater isolation of the
little kingdom, its more intimate relations with the neighbouring
wilderness, and the more primitive modes of life which resulted,
were also factors which contributed to this general result.
In the capital of course the life was not primitive, and its
influence was undoubtedly greater than that of the country.
Successive kings exerted themselves for its external improvement,
and in this respect Hezekiah ben Ahaz was specially
distinguished. Above all they manifested sincere interest in the
temple, which from an early period exerted a powerful force of
attraction over the entire mass of the population. They
regulated the cultus according to their individual tastes, added
to it or curtailed it at their pleasure, and dealt with the sacred
treasures as they chose. Although the priests had in a certain
sense great power--the conspiracy against Athaliah was led not by
a prophet but by a priest,--they were nevertheless subjects of
the king, and had to act according to his orders. That the cultus
of Jehovah at Jerusalem was purer than that at Bethel or at
Samaria is an assertion which is contradicted by more than one
well-attested fact. In this respect there was no essential
difference between Israel and Judah. It was in Israel that the
reaction against Baal-worship originated which afterwards passed
over into Judah; the initiative in all such matters was Israel's.
There the experiments were made from which Jerusalem learned the
lesson. How deep was the interest felt in the affairs of the larger
kingdom by the inhabitants even of one of the smaller provincial
towns of Judah is shown in the instance of Amos of Tekoah.
Step by step with the decline of Israel after the death of
Jeroboam II. did Judah rise in importance; it was already
preparing to take the inheritance. The man through whom the
transition of the history from Israel to Judah was effected, and
who was the means of securing for the latter kingdom a period of
respite which was fruitful of the best results for the
consolidation of true religion, was the Prophet Isaiah. The
history of his activity is at the same time the history of
Judah during that period.
Isaiah became conscious of his vocation in the year of King
Uzziah's death; his earliest discourses date from the beginning
of the reign of Ahaz. In them he contemplates the imminent
downfall of Samaria, and threatens Judah also with the
chastisement its political and social sins deserve. In chapter ix.,
and also in chapters ii.-v., he still confines himself on the whole
to generalities quite after the manner of Amos. But on the
occasion of the expedition of the allied Syrians and Ephraimites
against Jerusalem he interposed with bold decision in the sphere of
practical politics. To the very last he endeavoured to restrain
Ahaz from his purpose of summoning the Assyrians to his help; he
assured him of Jehovah's countenance, and offered him a token in
pledge. When the king refused this, the prophet recognised that
matters had gone too far, and that the coming of the Assyrians
could not be averted. He then declared that the dreaded danger
would indeed be obviated by that course, but that another far
more serious would be incurred. For the Egyptians would resist
the westward movement of Assyria, and Judah as the field of war
would be utterly laid waste; only a remnant would remain as the
basis of a better future.
The actual issue, however, was not yet quite so disastrous. The
Egyptians did not interfere with the Assyrians, and left Samaria
and Damascus to their fate. Judah became indeed tributary to
Assyria, but at the same time enjoyed considerable prosperity.
Henceforward the prophet's most zealous efforts were directed to
the object of securing the maintenance, at any price, of this
condition of affairs. He sought by every means at his command to
keep Judah from any sort of intervention in the politics of the
great powers, in order that it might devote itself with undivided
energies to the necessities of internal affairs. He actually
succeeded in maintaining the peace for many years, even at times
when in the petty kingdoms around the spirit of revolt was abroad.
The ill success of all attempts elsewhere to shake off the yoke
confirmed him in the conviction that Assyria was the rod of
chastisement wielded by Jehovah over the nations, who had no
alternative but to yield to its iron sway.
While thirty years passed thus peacefully away so far as foreign
relations were concerned, internal changes of all the greater
importance were taking place. Hezekiah ben Ahaz undertook for
the first time a thoroughgoing reformation in the cultus of
Jehovah. "He removed the high places, and brake the pillars,
and cut down the Ashera, and brake in pieces the brazen serpent
that Moses had made;" so we are told in 2Kings xviii. 4, with
a mixture of the general and the special that does not inspire
much confidence. For, e.g., the "high places" which Solomon
had raised on the Mount of Olives were not removed by Hezekiah,
although they stood quite close to Jerusalem, and moreover were
consecrated to foreign deities. But in every respect there must
have been a wide difference between the objects and results of
the reformations of Hezekiah and Josiah. Undoubtedly Hezekiah
undertook his reforms in worship under the influence of Isaiah.
Following in the footsteps of Hosea, who had been the first to
take and to express offence at the use of images in the worship
of Jehovah, this prophet, utilising the impression which the
destruction of Samaria had produced in Jerusalem (Isaiah
xvii., cf. Jeremiah iii.), strove to the utmost against the
adoration of the work of men's hands in the holy places, against
the Asheras and pillars (sun-pillars), and above all against the
ephods, i.e., the idols of silver and gold, of which the land was
full. But against the high places in and by themselves, against
the multiplicity of the altars of Jehovah, he made no protest.
"( In the Messianic time) ye shall loathe and cast away as an
unclean thing your graven images with silver coverings and your
molten images overlaid with gold," he says (xxx. 22); and the
inference is that he contemplated the purification of the high
places from superstitious excesses, but by no means their abolition.
To this one object /1/
********************************
1. That is, to the abolition of the images. Jeremiah's polemic
is directed no longer against the images, but against wood
and stone, i.e, Asheras and pillars. The date of the reformation
under Hezekiah is uncertain; perhaps it ought to be placed after
Sennacherib's withdrawal from Jerusalem.
********************************
Hezekiah's reformation seems to have confined itself,--an object
of much greater primary importance than the destruction of the
altars themselves. Their destruction was a measure which arose
simply out of despair of the possibility of cleansing them.
Sargon, king of Assyria, was succeeded in 705 by Sennacherib.
The opportunity was seized by Merodach Baladan of Babylon to secure
his independence; and by means of an embassy he urged Hezekiah
also to throw off the yoke. The proposal was adopted, and the
king of Judah was joined by other petty kingdoms, especially
some of the Philistine towns. Relations with Egypt were
established to secure its support in case of need. Sennacherib's
more immediate and pressing business in Babylon enabled Palestine
to gain some time; but the issue of that revolt made
self-deception impossible as to the probable result of the other
movement.
This was the period at which Isaiah, already far advanced in life,
wielded his greatest influence. The preparations for revolt, the
negotiations with Egypt, were concealed from him,-a proof how
greatly he was feared at court. When he came to know of them, it
was already too late to undo what had been done. But he could at
least give vent to his anger. With Jerusalem, it seemed to him,
the story of Samaria was repeating itself; uninstructed by that
sad lesson, the capital was giving itself up to the mad
intoxication of leaders who would inevitably bring her to ruin.
"Quietness and rest" had been the motto given by Jehovah to
Judah, powerless as it was and much in need of a period of peace;
instead of this, defiance based on ignorance and falsehood
expressed the prevailing temper. But those who refused to listen
to the intelligible language of Jehovah would be compelled to hear
Him speak in Assyrian speech in a way that would deafen and blind
them. Isaiah shows himself no less indignant against the crowd
that stupidly stared at his excitement than against the
God-forsaken folly of the king, with his counsellors, his priests,
and his prophets. They do not suffer themselves to be shaken out
of their ordinary routine by the gravity of such a crisis as
this; the living work of Jehovah is to them a sealed book; their
piety does not extend beyond the respect they show for certain
human precepts learnt by rote.
Meanwhile Sennacherib, at the head of a great army, was advancing
against Philistia and Judah along the Phoenician coast (701).
Having captured Ascalon, he next laid siege to Ekron, which,
after the combined Egyptian and Ethiopian army sent to its relief
had been defeated at Eltheke, fell into the enemy's hand, and was
severely dealt with. Simultaneously various fortresses of Judah
were occupied, and the level country was devastated (Isaiah i.).
The consequence was that Hezekiah, in a state of panic, offered
to the Assyrians his sub-mission, which was accepted on payment of
a heavy penalty, he being permitted, however, to retain possession
of Jerusalem. He seemed to have got cheaply off from the unequal
contest.
The way being thus cleared, Sennacherib pressed on southwards, for
the Egyptians were collecting their forces against him. The nearer
he came to the enemy the more undesirable did he find it that he
should leave in his rear so important a fortress as Jerusalem in
the hands of a doubtful vassal. Notwithstanding the recently
ratified treaty, therefore, he demanded the surrender of the
city, believing that a policy of intimidation would be enough to
secure it from Hezekiah. But there was another personality in
Jerusalem of whom his plans had taken no account. Isaiah had
indeed regarded the revolt from Assyria as a rebellion against
Jehovah Himself, and therefore as a perfectly hopeless undertaking
which could only result in the utmost humiliation and sternest
chastisement for Judah. But still more distinctly than those who
had gone before him did he hold firm as an article of faith the
conviction that the kingdom would not be utterly annihilated; all
his speeches of solemn warning closed with the announcement that
a remnant should return and form the kernel of a new commonwealth
to be fashioned after Jehovah's own heart. For him, in contrast to
Amos, the great crisis had a positive character; in contrast to
Hosea, he did not expect a temporary suspension of the theocracy,
to be followed by its complete reconstruction, but in the pious
and God-fearing individuals who were still to be met with in this
Sodom of iniquity, he saw the threads, thin indeed yet sufficient,
which formed the links between the Israel of the present and its
better future. Over against the vain confidence of the multitude
Isaiah had hitherto brought into prominence the darker obverse of
his religious belief, but now he confronted their present
depression with its bright reverse; faint-heartedness was still
more alien to his nature than temerity. In the name of Jehovah he
bade King Hezekiah be of good courage, and urged that he should by
no means surrender. The Assyrians would not be able to take the
city, not even to shoot an arrow into it nor to bring up their
siege train against it. "I know thy sitting, thy going, and thy
standing," is Jehovah's language to the Assyrian, "and also thy
rage against me. And I will put my ring in thy nose, and my
bridle in thy lips, and I will turn thee back by the way by
which thou camest." And thus it proved in the issue. By a still
unexplained catastrophe, the main army of Sennacherib was
annihilated on the frontier between Egypt and Palestine, and
Jerusalem thereby freed from all danger. The Assyrian king had to
save himself by a hurried retreat to Nineveh; Isaiah was
triumphant. A more magnificent close of a period of influential
public life can hardly be imagined.
*****
What Sennacherib himself relates of his expedition against his
rebellious vassals in Palestine (George Smith, Assyrian Eponym
Canon, p. 67, 68, 131-136) runs parallel with 2 Kings xviii. 14-16,
but not with the rest of the Bible narrative. These three verses
are peculiar, and their source is different from that of the context.
After having captured various Phoenician cities, and received tribute
from a number of kings, his first measure is forcibly to restore the
Assyrian governor who had been expelled from Ascalon, and next he
turns his arms against Ekron. This city had put in irons its own
king, Padi (who remained loyal to the suzerain), and handed him over
to Hezekiah, who appears as the soul of the rebellion in these
quarters. The Egyptians, who as usual have a hand in the matter,
advance with an army for the relief of the beleaguered city, but
are defeated near Eltheke in the immediate neighbourhood; Ekron is
taken, remorselessly chastised, and forced to take Padi back again
as its king. For Hezekiah in the meantime has delivered up his
prisoner, and, terrified by the fall of his fortresses and the
devastation of his territory, has accepted the position of a vassal
once more, paying at the same time a heavy fine, inclusive of
30 talents of gold and 800 of silver. Such is the Assyrian account.
If we treat the 300 talents mentioned in 2Kings xviii. 14 as
Syrian (=800 Babylonian), it completely fills in the vague outlines
given in 2Kings xviii. 14-16, and, while confirming in their place
immediately after ver. 13 these verses, unrelated as they are to
the main connection of the Biblical narrative, corrects them only
in one point, by making it probable that the subjection of
Hezekiah (which is not equivalent to the surrender of his city)
took place while Sennacherib was still before Ekron, and not at
later date when he had gone further south towards Libnah. As
regards his further advance towards Egypt, and the reasons of his
sudden withdrawal (related by Herodotus also from Egyptian tradition),
the great king is silent, having nothing to boast of in it.
The battle of Eltheke, which is to be regarded only as an episode
in the siege of Ekron, being merely the repulse of the Egyptian
relieving army, was not an event of great historical importance,
and ought not to be brought into any connection either with 2Kings
xix. 7 or with xix. 35; Sennacherib's inscription speaks only of
the first and prosperous stage of the expedition, not of the decisive
one which resulted so disastrously for him, as must be clear from
the words themselves to every unprejudiced reader.
8. THE PROPHETIC REFORMATION.
Isaiah was so completely a prophet that even his wife was called
the prophetess after him. No such title could have been bestowed
on the wife of either Amos or Hosea. But what distinguished him
more than anything else from those predecessors was that his
position was not, like theirs, apart from the government; he sat
close to the helm, and took a very real part in directing the
course of the vessel. He was more positive and practical than
they; he wished to make his influence felt, and when for the
moment he was unsuccessful in this so far as the great whole of the
state was concerned, he busied himself in gathering round him a
small circle of like-minded persons on whom his hope for the future
rested. Now that Israel had been destroyed, he wished at all
events to save Judah. The lofty ideality of his faith (ii. 1 seq.)
did not hinder him from calling in the aid of practical means
for this end. But the current of his activities was by the
circumstances of the case directed into a channel in which after
his death they continued to flow towards a goal which had hardly
been contemplated by himself.
The political importance of the people of Jehovah was reduced to a
minimum when Judah only was left. Already at an earlier period
in that kingdom the sacred had come to be of more importance than
the secular; much more was this the case under the suzerainty of
Assyria. The circumstances of the time themselves urged that the
religion of Israel should divest itself of all politico-national
character; but Isaiah also did his best to further this end. It
was his most zealous endeavour to hold king and people aloof from
every patriotic movement; to him the true religious attitude was
one of quietness and sitting still, non-intervention in political
affairs, concentration on the problems of internal government. But
he was compelled to leave over for the coming Messiah (xi. 1 seq.)
that reformation in legal and social matters which seemed to him so
necessary; all that he could bring the secular rulers of his
country to undertake was a reform in worship. This was the most
easily solved of the problems alluded to above, and it was also
that which most closely corresponded to the character of the
kingdom of Judah. Thus it came about that the reform of the
theocracy which had been contemplated by Isaiah led to its
transformation into an ecclesiastical state. No less influential
in effecting a radical change in the old popular religion was
Isaiah's doctrine which identified the true Israel with the
holy remnant which alone should emerge from the crisis unconsumed.
For that remnant was more than a mere object of hope; it actually
stood before him in the persons of that little group of pious
individuals gathered around him. Isaiah founded no "ecclesiola
in ecclesia" indeed, but certainly an "ecclesia in civitate Dei."
Now began that distinction between the true Israel and the Israel
according to the flesh, that bipartite division of the nation
which became so important in later times. As head and founder
of the prophetic party in Judah, Isaiah was, involuntarily,
the man who took the first steps towards the institution of
the church.
The catastrophe which befell the army of Sennacherib had no very
great effect upon the external affairs of Judah. Sennacherib
indeed, being busy in the east, was unable to retrieve the loss he
had sustained, but his son Esarhaddon, who succeeded him in 681,
resumed the Egyptian war with better success. He made himself
master of the Nile valley, and brought the Ethiopians into
submission. That the petty kingdoms of Palestine returned to the
old relations of dependence is to be taken as a matter of course.
Judah appears to have resumed the yoke voluntarily, but the
Samaritans only after force had been applied; they were
afterwards deported, whereupon the deserted country was occupied
by foreign colonists, who, however, accepted the cultus of the god
of the land.
That Manasseh ben Hezekiah should have again come under Assyrian
suzerainty appears at that time to have made but little impression;
since the time of Ahaz Judah had been accustomed to this
relation. The Book of Kings speaks only of internal affairs under the
reign of Manasseh. According to it, he was a bad ruler, who
permitted, and even caused, innocent blood to flow like water.
But what was of greater consequence for the future, he took up an
attitude of hostility towards the prophetic party of reform, and
put himself on the side of the reaction which would fain bring back
to the place of honour the old popular half-pagan conception of
Jehovah, as against the pure and holy God whom the prophets
worshipped. The revulsion manifested itself as the reform had
done, chiefly in matters of worship. The old idolatrous
furniture of the sanctuaries was reinstated in its place, and new
frippery was imported from all quarters, especially from Assyria
and Babylon, to renovate the old religion; with Jehovah was now
associated a "queen of heaven." Yet, as usual, the restoration did
more than merely bring back the old order of things. What at an
earlier period had been mere naivete now became superstition, and
could hold its ground only by having imparted to it artificially
a deeper meaning which was itself borrowed from the prophetical
circle of ideas. Again, earnestness superseded the old joyousness
of the cultus; this now had reference principally to sin and its
atonement. Value was attached to services rendered to the Deity,
just in proportion to their hardness and unnaturalness; at this
period it was that the old precept to sacrifice to Jehovah the male
that opens the matrix was extended to children. The counter-
reformation was far from being unaffected by the preceding
reformation, although it understood religious earnestness in
quite another sense, and sought, not to eliminate heathenism from
the cultus, but to animate it with new life. On the other hand,
the reaction was, in the end, found to have left distinct traces of
its influence in the ultimate issue of the reformation.
We possess one document dating from Manasseh's time in Micah vi. 1-
vii. 6. Here, where the lawlessness and utter disregard of
every moral restraint in Judah are set in a hideous light, the
prophetic point of view, as contrasted with the new refinements in
worship, attains also its simplest and purest expression. Perhaps
to this period the Decalogue also, which is so eloquently
silent in regard to cultus, is to be assigned. Jehovah demands
nothing for Himself, all that He asks is only for men; this is
here the fundamental law of the theocracy.
Manasseh's life was a long one, and his son Amon walked in his
ways. The latter died after a brief reign, and with his death a
new era for Judah began. It was introduced by the great
catastrophe in which the Assyrian empire came to an end. The
sovereignty of the world was beginning to pass out of the hands of
the Semites into those of the Aryans. Phraortes of Media indeed
was unsuccessful in his attempt against the Assyrians, but Cyaxares
beat them and proceeded to besiege their capital. The Scythian
invasion of Media and Western Asia (c. 630) at this juncture gave
them another respite of more than twenty years; but even it
tended to break in pieces the great, loosely-compacted monarchy.
The provinces became gradually disintegrated, and the kingdom
shrivelled up till it covered no more than the land of Asshur. /1/
****************************************
1. Our knowledge of the events of the second half of the 7th century
has remained singularly imperfect hitherto, notwithstanding the
importance of the changes they wrought on the face of the ancient
world. The account given above is that of Herodotus (i. 103-106),
and there the matter must rest until really authentic sources shall
have been brought to light. With regard to the final
siege of Nineveh, our chief informant is Ctesias as quoted by
Diodorus (ii. 26, 27). Whether the prophecy of Nabum relates to
the LAST siege is doubtful (in spite of ii. 7, and the oracle
given in Diodorus, (OTI THN *NINON )OUDEIS (ELEI KATA KRATOS )EAN
MH PROTERON (O POTAMOS TH| POLEI GENHTAI POLEMOS), inasmuch as Nahum
(i. 9) expressly speaks of the siege alluded to by him as the
first, saying, "the trouble shall not rise up the second time."
******************************************
The inroad of the Scythians aroused to energy again the voice of
prophecy which had been dumb during the very sinful but not very
animated period of Manasseh's reign. Zephaniah and Jeremiah
threatened with the mysterious northern foe, just as Amos and Hosea
had formerly done with the Assyrians. The Scythians actually did
invade Palestine in 626 (the 13th year of Josiah), and penetrated
as far as to Egypt; but their course lay along the shore line,
and they left Judah untouched. This danger that had come so near
and yet passed them by, this instance of a prophetic threatening
that had come to pass and yet been mercifully averted, made a
powerful impression upon the people of Judah; public opinion went
through a revolution in favour of the reforming party which was
able to gain for itself the support also of the young king Josiah
ben Amon. The circumstances were favourable for coming forward
with a comprehensive programme for a reconstruction of the
theocracy. In the year 621 (the eighteenth of Josiah) Deuteronomy
was discovered, accepted, and carried into effect.
The Deuteronomic legislation is designed for the reformation, by
no means of the cultus alone, but at least quite as much of the
civil relations of life. The social interest is placed above the
cultus, inasmuch as everywhere humane ends are assigned for the
rites and offerings. In this it is plainly seen that
Deuteronomy is the progeny of the prophetic spirit. Still more
plainly does this appear in the _motifs_ of the legislation;
according to these, Jehovah is the only God, whose service demands
the whole heart and every energy; He has entered into a covenant
with Israel, but upon fundamental conditions that, as contained
in the Decalogue, are purely moral and of absolute universality.
Nowhere does the fundamental religious thought of prophecy find
clearer expression than in Deuteronomy,--the thought that Jehovah
asks nothing for Himself, but asks it as a religious duty that man
should render to man what is right, that His will lies not in any
unknown height, but in the moral sphere which is known and
understood by all. /1/
**************************************
1. The commandments which I command thee are not unattainable for
thee, neither are they far off; not in heaven so that one might
say, Who can climb up into heaven and bring them down, and tell us
them that we might do them! not beyond the sea so that one might
say, Who shall go over the sea, and fetch them, and tell us them
that we might do them!--but the matter lies very near thee, in thy
mouth and in thy heart, so that thou canst do it (Deut. xxx. 11-14).
****************************************
But the result of the innovation did not correspond exactly to its
prophetic origin. Prophecy died when its precepts attained to the
force of laws; the prophetic ideas lost their purity when they
became practical. Whatever may have been contemplated, only
provisional regulations actually admitted of being carried, and
even these only in co-operation with the king and the priests, and
with due regard to the capacity of the masses. The final outcome
of the Deuteronomic reformation was principally that the cultus
of Jehovah was limited to Jerusalem and abolished everywhere
else,--such was the popular and practical form of prophetic
monotheism. The importance of the Salomonic temple was thereby
increased in the highest degree, and so also the influence of the
priests of Jerusalem, the sons of Zadok, who now in point of fact
got rid entirely of their rivals, the priests of the country
districts.
9. JEREMIAH AND THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM.
Josiah lived for thirteen years after the accomplishment of his
great work. It was a happy period of external and internal
prosperity. The nation possessed the covenant, and kept it. It
seemed as if the conditions had been attained on which, according
to the prophets, the continuance of the theocracy depended; if
their threatenings against Israel had been fulfilled, so now was
Judah proving itself the heir of their promises. Already in
Deuteronomy is the "extension of the frontier" taken into
consideration, and Josiah actually put his hand to the task of
seeking the attainment of this end.
Jehovah and Israel, religion and patriotism, once more went hand in
hand. Jeremiah alone did not suffer himself to be misled by the
general feeling. He was a second Amos, upon a higher platform--
but, unlike his predecessor, a prophet by profession; his
history, like Isaiah's, is practically the history of his time.
In the work of introducing Deuteronomy he had taken an active part,
and throughout his life he showed his zeal against unlawful altars
and against the adoration of wood and stone (Asheras and pillars).
But he was by no means satisfied with the efforts of the reformation
that had been effected; nothing appeared to him more sinful or
more silly than the false confidence produced by it in Jehovah
and in the inviolability of His one true temple. This confidence
he maintained to be delusive; Judah was not a whit better than
Israel had been, Jerusalem would be destroyed one day like the
temple of Shiloh. The external improvements on which the people
of Judah prided themselves he held to leave this severe judgment
unaffected; what was needed was a quite different sort of change,
a change of heart, not very easy positively to define.
An opportunity for showing his opposition presented itself to the
prophet at the juncture when King Josiah had fallen at Megiddo in
the battle with Pharaoh Necho (608), and when the people were
seeking safety and protection by cleaving to Jehovah and His holy
temple. At the instance of the priests and the prophets he had
almost expiated with his blood the blasphemies he had uttered
against the popular belief; but he did not suffer himself to be
driven from his course. Even when the times had grown quiet again,
he persisted, at the risk of his life and under universal reproach
and ridicule, in his work as a prophet of evil. Moments of despair
sometimes came to him; but that he had correctly estimated the
true value of the great conversion of the nation was speedily
proved by the facts. Although Deuteronomy was not formally
abolished under Jehoiakim, who as the vassal of Egypt ascended the
throne of his father Josiah, nevertheless it ceased to have
practical weight, the battle of Megiddo having shown that in spite
of the covenant with Jehovah the possibilities of non-success in
war remained the same as before. Jehoiakim tended to return to the
ways of Manasseh, not only as regarded idolatry, but also in his
contempt for law and the private rights of his subjects;--the two
things seem to stand in connection.
The course of events at last brought upon the theocracy the
visible ruin which Jeremiah had been so long expecting. After the
Egyptians had, with comparative ease, subjugated Syria at the time
when the Medes and Chaldaeans were busied with the siege of
Nineveh, Nebuchadnezzar, that task accomplished, came upon them
from Babylon and routed them on the Euphrates near Carchemish (605-4).
The people of Judah rejoiced at the fall of Nineveh, and also at
the result of Carchemish; but they were soon undeceived when the
prospect began to open on them of simply exchanging the Egyptian
for the Chaldaean yoke. The power of the Chaldaeans had been quite
unsuspected, and now it was found that in them the Assyrians had
suddenly returned to life. Jeremiah was the only man who gained
any credit by these events. His much ridiculed "enemy out of
the north," of whom he had of old been wont to speak so much, now
began to be talked of with respect, although his name was no longer
"the Scythian" but "the Babylonian." It was an epoch,--the close
of an account which balanced in his favour. Therefore it was that
precisely at this moment he received the Divine command to commit
to writing that which for twenty-three years he had been preaching,
and which, ever pronounced impossible, had now showed itself so
close at hand.
After the victory of Carchemish the Chaldaeans drove Pharaoh out
of Syria, and also compelled the submission of Jehoiakim (c. 602).
For three years he continued to pay his tribute, and then he
withheld it; a mad passion for liberty, kindled by religious
fanaticism, had begun to rage with portentous power amongst the
influential classes, the grandees, the priests, and the prophets.
Nebuchadnezzar satisfied himself in the first instance with raising
against Judah several of the smaller nationalities around,
especially the Edomites; not till 597 did he appear in person
before Jerusalem. The town was compelled to yield; the more
important citizens were carried into exile, amongst them the young
king Jechoniah, son of Jehoiakim, who had died in the interval;
Zedekiah ben Josiah was made king in his stead over the remnant
left behind. The patriotic fanaticism that had led to the revolt
was not broken even by this blow. Within four years afterwards
new plans of liberation began to be again set on foot; but on this
occasion the influence of Jeremiah proved strong enough to avert
the danger. But when a definite prospect of help from Pharaoh
Hophra (Apries) presented itself in 589, the craving for
independence proved quite irrepressible. Revolt was declared; and
in a very short time the Chaldaean army, with Nebuchadnezzar at
its head, lay before Jerusalem. For a while everything seemed to
move prosperously; the Egyptians came to the rescue, and the
Chaleaeans were compelled to raise the siege in order to cope
with them. At this there was great joy in Jerusalem; but Jeremiah
continued to express his gloomy views. The event proved that he
was right; the Egyptians were repulsed and the siege resumed.
The city was bent on obstinate resistance; in vain did Jeremiah,
at continual risk of his life, endeavour to bring it to reason.
The king, who agreed with the prophet, did not venture to assert
his opinion against the dominant terrorism. The town in these
circumstances was at last taken by storm, and along with the temple,
reduced to ruins. Cruel vengeance was taken on the king and grandees,
and the pacification of the country was ensured by another and
larger deportation of the inhabitants to Babylon. Thus terminated
in 586 the kingdom of Judah.
The prophets had been the spiritual destroyers of the old Israel.
In old times the nation had been the ideal of religion in actual
realisation; the prophets confronted the nation with an ideal to
which it did not correspond. Then to bridge over this interval the
abstract ideal was framed into a law, and to this law the nation
was to be conformed. The attempt had very important consequences,
inasmuch as Jehovah continued to be a living power in the law,
when He was no longer realised as present in the nation; but that
was not what the prophets had meant to effect. What they were
unconsciously labouring towards was that religious individualism
which had its historical source in the national downfall, and
manifested itself not exclusively within the prophetical sphere.
With such men as Amos and Hosea the moral personality based upon
an inner conviction burst through the limits of mere nationality;
their mistake was in supposing that they could make their way of
thinking the basis of a national life. Jeremiah saw through the
mistake; the true Israel was narrowed to himself. Of the truth of
his conviction he never had a moment's doubt; he knew that Jehovah
was on his side, that on Him depended the eternal future. But,
instead of the nation, the heart and the individual conviction were
to him the subject of religion. On the ruins of Jerusalem he gazed
into the future filled with joyful hope, sure of this that Jehovah
would one day pardon past sin and renew the relation which had
been broken off-though on the basis of another covenant than that
laid down in Deuteronomy. "I will put my law upon their heart,
and write it on their mind; none shall say to his neighbour, Know
the Lord, for all shall have that knowledge within them."
10. THE CAPTIVITY AND THE RESTORATION
The exiled Jews were not scattered all over Chaldaea, but were
allowed to remain together in families and clans. Many of them,
notwithstanding this circumstance, must have lapsed and become
merged in the surrounding heathenism; but many also continued
faithful to Jehovah and to Israel. They laboured under much
depression and sadness, groaning under the wrath of Jehovah, who
had rejected His people and cancelled His covenant. They were
lying under a sort of vast interdict; they could not celebrate
any sacrifice or keep any feast; they could only observe days of
fasting and humiliation, and such rites as had no inseparable
connection with the holy land. The observance of the Sabbath,
and the practice of the rite of circumcision, acquired much
greater importance than they formerly possessed as signs of a
common religion. The meetings on the Sabbath day out of which
the synagogues were afterwards developed appear to have first
come into use during this period; perhaps also even then it had
become customary to read aloud from the prophetic writings which
set forth that all had happened in the providence of God, and
moreover that the days of adversity were not to last for ever.
Matters improved somewhat as Cyrus entered upon his victorious
career. Was he the man in whom the Messianic prophecies had found
their fulfilment? The majority were unwilling to think so. For it
was out of Israel (they argued) that the Messiah was to proceed who
should establish the kingdom of God upon the ruins of the kingdoms
of the world; the restitution effected by means of a Persian could
only be regarded as a passing incident in the course of an historical
process that had its goal entirely elsewhere. This doubt was met by
more than one prophetical writer, and especially by the great
anonymous author to whom we are indebted for Isaiah xl.-lxvi.
"Away with sorrow; deliverance is at the door! Is it a humiliating
thing that Israel should owe its freedom to a Persian? Nay, is it
not rather a proof of the world-wide sway of the God of Jacob that He
should thus summon His instruments from the ends of the earth? Who
else than Jehovah could have thus sent Cyrus? Surely not the false
gods which he has destroyed? Jehovah alone it was who foretold and
foreknew the things which are now coming to pass,--because long ago
He had prearranged and predetermined them, and they are now being
executed in accordance with his plan. Rejoice therefore in the
prospect of your near deliverance; prepare yourselves for the new era;
gird yourselves for the return to your homes."
It is to be observed, as characteristic in this prophecy, how the
idea of Jehovah as God alone and God over all--in constantly recurring
lyrical parenthesis he is praised as the author of the world and of
all nature--is yet placed in positive relation to Israel alone, and
that upon the principle that Israel is in exclusive possession of the
universal truth, which cannot perish with Israel, but must through
the instrumentality of Israel, become the common possession of the
whole world. "There is no God but Jehovah, and Israel is his prophet."
For many years the Persian monarch put the patience of the Jews to
the proof; Jehovah's judgment upon the Chaldaeans, instead of
advancing, seemed to recede. At length, however, their hopes were
realised; in the year 538 Cyrus brought the empire of Babylon to
an end, and gave the exiles leave to seek their fatherland once more.
This permission was not made use of by all, or even by a majority.
The number of those who returned is stated at 42,360; whether women
and children are included in this figure is uncertain. On arriving
at their destination, after the difficult march through the desert,
they did not spread themselves over the whole of Judah, but settled
chiefly in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. The Calebites, for example,
who previously had had their settlements in and around Hebron, now
settled in Bethlehem and in the district of Ephrath. They found
it necessary to concentrate themselves in face of a threatened
admixture of doubtful elements. From all sides people belonging
to the surrounding nations had pressed into the depopulated territory
of Judah. Not only had they annexed the border territories--where,
for example, the Edomites or Idumaeans held the whole of the Negeb
as far as to Hebron; they had effected lodgments everywhere, and--
as the Ammonites, Ashdodites, and especially the Samaritans--had
amalgamated with the older Jewish population, a residue of which
had remained in the country in spite of all that had happened.
These half-breed "pagani" (Amme haarec 'oxloi) gave a friendly
reception to the returning exiles (Bne haggola); particularly
did the Samaritans show themselves anxious to make common cause
with them. But they were met with no reciprocal cordiality.
The lesson of religious isolation which the children of the
captivity had learned in Babylon, they did not forget on their
return to their home. Here also they lived as in a strange land.
Not the native of Judaea, but the man who could trace his descent
from the exiles in Babylon, was reckoned as belonging to their
community.
The first decennia after the return of the exiles, during which
they were occupied in adjusting themselves to their new homes,
were passed under a variety of adverse circumstances and by no
means either in joyousness or security. Were these then the
Messianic times which, it had been foretold, were to dawn at the
close of their captivity? They did not at all events answer the
expectations which had been formed. A settlement had been again
obtained, it was true, in the fatherland; but the Persian yoke
pressed now more heavily than ever the Babylonian had done. The
sins of God's people seemed still unforgiven, their period of
bond-service not yet at an end. A slight improvement, as is shown
by the prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah, followed when in the
year 520 the obstacles disappeared which until then had stood in
the way of the rebuilding of the temple; the work then begun was
completed in 516. Inasmuch as the Jews were now nothing more
than a religious community, based upon the traditions of a national
existence that had ceased, the rebuilding of the temple, naturally,
was for them an event of supreme importance.
The law of the new theocracy was the Book of Deuteronomy; this
was the foundation on which the structure was to be built. But the
force of circumstances, and the spirit of the age, had even before
and during the exile exerted a modifying influence upon that
legislative code; and it continued to do so still. At first a
"son of David" had continued to stand at the head of the Bne
haggola, but this last relic of the old monarchy soon had to give
way to a Persian governor who was under the control of the satrap
of trans-Euphratic Syria, and whose principal business was the
collection of revenue. Thenceforward the sole national chief was
Joshua the high priest, on whom, accordingly, the political
representation also of the community naturally devolved. In the
circumstances as they then were no other arrangement was possible.
The way had been paved for it long before in so far as the
Assyrians had destroyed the kingdom of Israel, while in the kingdom
of Judah which survived it the religious cultus had greater importance
attached to it than political affairs, and also inasmuch as in
point of fact the practical issue of the prophetic reformation
sketched in Deuteronomy had been to make the temple the national
centre still more than formerly. The hierocracy towards which
Ezekiel had already opened the way was simply inevitable. It took
the form of a monarchy of the high priest, he having stepped into
the place formerly occupied by the theocratic king. As his peers
and at his side stood the members of his clan, the Levites of the
old Jerusalem, who traced their descent from Zadok (Sadduk);
the common Levites held a much lower rank, so far as they had
maintained their priestly rank at all and had not been degraded,
in accordance with Ezekiel's law (chapter xliv.), to the position
of mere temple servitors. "Levite," once the title of honour
bestowed on all priests, became more and more confined to members
of the second order of the clergy.
Meanwhile no improvement was taking place in the condition of the
Jewish colonists. They were poor; they had incurred the
hostility of their neighbours by their exclusiveness; the
Persian Government was suspicious; the incipient decline of the
great kingdom was accompanied with specially unpleasant
consequences so far as Palestine was concerned (Megabyzus). All
this naturally tended to produce in the community a certain
laxity and depression. To what purpose (it was asked) all this
religious strictness, which led to so much that was unpleasant?
Why all this zeal for Jehovah, who refused to be mollified by it?
It is a significant fact that the upper ranks of the priesthood
were least of all concerned to counteract this tendency. Their
priesthood was less to them than the predominance which was based
upon it; they looked upon the neighbouring ethnarchs as their
equals, and maintained relations of friendship with them. The
general community was only following their example when it also
began to mingle with the Amme haarec.
The danger of Judaism merging into heathenism was imminent. But it
was averted by a new accession from without. In the year 458 Ezra
the scribe, with a great number of his compatriots, set out from
Babylon, for the purpose of reinforcing the Jewish element in
Palestine. The Jews of Babylon were more happily situated than
their Palestinian brethren, and it was comparatively easy for
them to take up a separatist attitude, because they were
surrounded by heathenism not partial but entire. They were no
great losers from the circumstance that they were precluded from
participating directly in the life of the ecclesiastical
community; the Torah had long ago become separated from the
people, and was now an independent abstraction following a career
of its own. Babylonia was the place where a further codification
of the law had been placed alongside of Deuteronomy. Ezekiel had
led the way in reducing to theory and to writing the sacred praxis
of his time; in this he was followed by an entire school; in their
exile the Levites turned scribes. Since then Babylon continued to
be the home of the Torah; and, while in Palestine itself the
practice was becoming laxer, their literary study had gradually
intensified the strictness and distinctive peculiarities of
Judaism. And now there came to Palestine a Babylonian scribe
having the law of his God in his hand, and armed with authority
from the Persian king to proceed upon the basis of this law with a
reformation of the community.
Ezra did not set about introducing the new law immediately on his
arrival in Judaea In the first instance he concentrated his
attention on the task of effecting a strict separation between the
Bne haggola and the heathen or half-heathen inhabitants. So much
he could accomplish upon the basis of Deuteronomy, but it was long
before he gave publicity to the law which he himself had brought.
Why he hesitated so long it is impossible to say; between the
seventh and the twentieth year of Artaxerxes Longimanus (458-445
B.C.) there is a great hiatus in the narrative of the books of Ezra
and Nehemiah. The main reason appears to have been that, in spite
of the good will of the Persian king, Ezra had not the vigorous
support of the local authorities. But this was indispensably
necessary in order to secure recognition for a new law.
At last, in 445, it fell to the lot of a Jew, who also shared the
views of Ezra, Nehemiah ben Hakkelejah, /1/
******************************************
1. According to the present punctuation this name is Hakalja
(Hachaljah), but such a pronunciation is inadmissible; it has no
possible etymology, the language having no such word as _hakal_.
The name in its correct form means "wait upon Jehovah."
*******************************************
the cupbearer and the favourite of Artaxerxes, to be sent as Persian
governor to Judaea. After he had freed the community from external
pressure with vigour and success, and brought it into more tolerable
outward circumstances, the business of introducing the new law-book
was next proceeded with; in this Ezra and Nehemiah plainly acted in
concert.
On the first of Tisri--the year is unfortunately not given, but it
cannot have been earlier than 444 B.C.--the promulgation of the
law began at a great gathering in Jerusalem; Ezra, supported by
the Levites, was present. Towards the end of the month, the
concluding act took place, in which the community became solemnly
bound by the contents of the law. Special prominence was given to
those provisions with which the people were directly concerned,
particularly those which related to the dues payable by the laity
to the priests.
The covenant which hitherto had rested on Deuteronomy was thus
expanded into a covenant based upon the entire Pentateuch.
Substantially at least Ezra's law-book, in the form in which it
became the Magna Charta of Judaism in or about the year 444, must
be regarded as practically identical with our Pentateuch, although
many minor amendments and very considerable additions may have
been made at a later date.
The character of the post-Deuteronomic legislation (Priestly Code)
is chiefly marked, in its external aspects, by the immense
extension of the dues payable to the priests, and by the sharp
distinction made between the descendants of Aaron and the common
Levites; this last feature is to be traced historically to the
circumstance that after the Deuteronomic reformation the legal
equality between the Levites who until then had ministered at the
"high places" and the priests of the temple at Jerusalem was not
_de facto_ recognised. Internally, it is mainly characterised by
its ideal of Levitical holiness, the way in which it everywhere
surrounds life with purificatory and propitiatory ceremonies, and
its prevailing reference of sacrifice to sin. Noteworthy also is
the manner in which everything is regarded from the point of view
of Jerusalem, a feature which comes much more boldly into
prominence here than in Deuteronomy; the nation and the temple are
strictly speaking identified. That externalisation towards which
the prophetical movement, in order to become practical, had
already been tending in Deuteronomy finally achieved its acme
in the legislation of Ezra; a new artificial Israel was the
result; but, after all, the old would have pleased an Amos better.
At the same time it must be remembered that the kernel needed a
shell. It was a necessity that Judaism should incrust itself in
this manner; without those hard and ossified forms the preservation
of its essential elements would have proved impossible. At
a time when all nationalities, and at the same time all bonds of
religion and national customs, were beginning to be broken up in
the seeming cosmos and real chaos of the Graeco-Roman empire, the
Jews stood out like a rock in the midst of the ocean. When the
natural conditions of independent nationality all failed them,
they nevertheless artificially maintained it with an energy
truly marvellous, and thereby preserved for themselves, and at the
same time for the whole world, an eternal good.
As regards the subsequent history of the Jewish community under
the Persian domination, we have almost no information. The high
priest in Nehemiah's time was Eliashib, son of Joiakim and grandson
of Joshua, the patriarchal head of the sons of Zadok, who had
returned from Babylon; he was succeeded in the direct line by
Joiada, Johanan, and Jaddua (Nehemiah xii. 10, 11, 22); the
last-named was in office at the time of Alexander the Great
(Josephus, Antiquities, xi. 8). Palestine was the province which
suffered most severely of all from the storms which marked the last
days of the sinking Persian empire, and it is hardly likely that
the Jews escaped their force; we know definitely, however, of only
one episode, in which the Persian general Bagoses interfered in a
disagreeable controversy about the high-priesthood (cir. 375).
To this period also (and not, as Josephus states, to the time of
Alexander) belongs the constitution of the Samaritan community on
an independent footing by Manasseh, a Jewish priest of rank. He
was expelled from Jerusalem by Nehemiah in 432, for refusing to
separate from his alien wife. He took shelter with his father-in-law
Sanballat, the Samaritan prince, who built him a temple on Mount
Gerizim near Shechem, where he organised a Samaritan church and a
Samaritan worship, on the Jerusalem model, and on the basis of a
but slightly modified Jerusalem Pentateuch. If the Samaritans
had hitherto exerted, themselves to the utmost to obtain admission
into the fellowship of the Jews, they henceforward were as averse
to have anything to do with these as these were to have any
dealings with them; the temple on Mount Gerizim was now the symbol
of their independence as a distinct religious sect. For the Jews
this was a great advantage, as they had no longer to dread the
danger of syncretism. They could now quite confidently admit
the Amme haarec into their communion, in the assurance of
assimilating them without any risk of the opposite process taking
place. The Judaizing process began first with the country
districts immediately surrounding Jerusalem, and then extended to
Galilee and many portions of Peraea. In connection with it, the
Hebrew language, which hitherto had been firmly retained by the
Bne haggola, now began to yield to the Aramaic, and to hold its own
only as a sacred speech.
____________
11. JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY.
The post-Deuteronomic legislation is not addressed to the people,
but to the congregation; its chief concern is the regulation of
worship. Political matters are not touched upon, as they are in
the hands of a foreigner lord. The hierocracy is taken for granted
as the constitution of the congregation. The head of the cultus is
the head of the whole; the high priest takes the place of the
king. The other priests, though his brothers or his sons, are
officially subordinate to him, as bishops to the supreme pontiff.
They, again, are distinguished from the Levites not only by their
office but also by their noble blood, though the Levites belong by
descent to the clergy, of which they form the lowest grade. The
material basis of the hierarchical pyramid is furnished by the
contributions of the laity, which are required on a scale which
cannot be called modest. Such is the outward aspect of the rule
of the holy in Israel. Inwardly, the ideal of holiness governs
the whole of life by means of a net of ceremonies and observances
which separate the Jew from the natural man. "Holy" means almost
the same as "exclusive." Originally the term was equivalent to
divine, but now it is used chiefly in the sense of religious,
priestly, as if the divine were to be known from the worldly, the
natural, by outward marks.
It had so fallen out, even before the exile, that the reform of
the theocracy which the prophets demanded began in the cultus;
and after the exile this tendency could not fail to be persisted in.
The restoration of Judaism took place in the form of a
restoration of the cultus. Yet this restoration was not a relapse
into the heathen ways which the prophets had attacked. The old
meaning of the festivals and of the sacrifices had long faded away,
and after the interruption of the exile they would scarcely have
blossomed again of themselves; they had become simply statutes,
unexplained commands of an absolute will. The cultus had no longer
any real value for the Deity; it was valuable only as an
exercise of obedience to the law. If it had been at first the
bond connecting Israel with heathenism, now, on the contrary, it
was the shield behind which Judaism retreated to be safe from
heathenism. There was no other means to make Judaism secure;
and the cultus was nothing more than a means to that end. It was
the shell around the faith and practice of the fathers, around the
religion of moral monotheism, which it alone preserved until it
could become the common property of the world. The great public
worship gave the new theocracy a firm centre, thus keeping it one
and undivided, and helped it to an organisation. But of more
importance was the minor private cultus of pious exercises, which
served to Judaize the whole life of every individual. For the centre
of gravity of Judaism was in the individual. Judaism was gathered
from scattered elements, and it depended on the labour of the
individual to make himself a Jew. This is the secret of the
persistence of Judaism, even in the diaspora. The initiatory act
of circumcision, which conferred an indelible character, was not
the only safeguard; the whole of the education which followed that
act went to guard against the disintegrating effects of individualism.
This is the real significance of the incessant discipline, which
consisted mainly in the observance of laws of purity and generally
of regulations devised to guard against sin. For what holiness
required was not to do good, but to avoid sin. By the sin and
trespass offerings, and by the great day of atonement, this
private cultus was connected with that of the temple; hence it was
that all these institutions fitted so admirably into the system.
The whole of life was directed in a definite sacred path; every
moment there was a divine command to fulfil, and this kept a man
from following too much the thoughts and desires of his own heart.
The Jews trained themselves with an earnestness and zeal which have
no parallel to create, in the absence of all natural conditions,
a holy nation which should answer to the law, the concrete embodiment
of the ideals of the prophets.
In the individualism thus moulded into uniformity lay the chief
difference which separated the new period from the old. The aim
was universal culture by the law, that the prophecy should be
fulfilled which says: "They shall all be taught of God." This
universal culture was certainly of a peculiar kind, and imposed
more troublesome observances than the culture of our day. Yet the
strange duties which the law imposed were not universally felt
to be a heavy burden. Precepts which were plain and had to do
with something outward were very capable of being kept; the
harder they seemed at first, the easier were they when the habit
had been formed. A man saw that he was doing what was prescribed,
and did not ask what was the use of it. The ever-growing body of
regulations even came to be felt as a sort of emancipation from
self. Never had the individual felt himself so responsible for all
he did and left undone, but the responsibility was oppressive, and
it was well that there should be a definite precept for every hour
of his life, thus diminishing the risk of his going astray. Nor
must we forget that the Torah contained other precepts than those
which were merely ceremonial. The kernel did not quite harden into
wood inside the shell; we must even acknowledge that moral sentiment
gained very perceptibly in this period both in delicacy and in
power. This also is connected with the fact that religion was not,
as before, the custom of the people, but the work of the
individual. A further consequence of this was, that men began to
reflect upon religion. The age in question saw the rise of the
so-called "Wisdom," of which we possess examples in the Book of
Job, in the Proverbs of Solomon and of the Son of Sirach, and in
Ecclesiastes. This wisdom flourished not only in Judah, but also
at the same time in Edom; it had the universalistic tendency
which is natural to reflection. The Proverbs of Solomon would
scarcely claim attention had they arisen on Greek or Arabian
soil; they are remarkable in their pale generality only because
they are of Jewish origin. In the Book of Job, a problem of faith
is treated by Syrians and Arabians just as if they were Jews. In
Ecclesiastes religion abandons the theocratic ground altogether,
and becomes a kind of philosophy in which there is room even for
doubt and unbelief. Speculation did not on the whole take away
from depth of feeling; on the contrary, individualism helped to
make religion more intense. This is seen strikingly in the Psalms,
which are altogether the fruit of this period. Even the sacrificial
practice of the priests was made subjective, being incorporated in
the Torah, i.e., made a matter for every one to learn. Though the
laity could not take part in the ceremony, they were at least to
be thoroughly informed in all the minutiae of the system; the law
was a means of interesting every one in the great public
sacrificial procedure. Another circumstance also tended to remove
the centre of gravity of the temple service from the priests to
the congregation. The service of song, though executed by choirs
of singers, was yet in idea the song of the congregation, and came
to be of more importance than the acts of worship which it
accompanied and inspired. The Holy One of Israel sat enthroned,
not on the smoke-pillars of the altar, but in the praises of the
congregation pouring out its heart in prayer; the sacrifices were
merely the external occasion for visiting the temple, the real
reason for doing so lay in the need for the strength and
refreshment to be found in religious fellowship.
By the Torah religion came to be a thing to be learned. Hence the
need of teachers in the church of the second temple. As the
scribes had codified the Torah, it was also their task to imprint
it on the minds of the people and to fill their life with it; in
this way they at the same time founded a supplementary and
changing tradition, which kept pace with the needs of the time.
The place of teaching was the synagogue; there the law and the
prophets were read and explained on the Sabbath. The synagogue and
the Sabbath were of more importance than the temple and the
festivals; and the moral influence of the scribes transcended that
of the priests, who had to be content with outward power and
dignity. The rule of religion was essentially the rule of the
law, and consequently the Rabbis at last served themselves heirs
to the hierarchs. At the same time, while the government of the
law was acknowledged in principle, it could at no time be said to
be even approximately realised in fact. The high-born priests who
stood at the head of the theocracy, cared chiefly, as was quite
natural, for the maintenance of their own supremacy. And there
were sheep in the flock not to be kept from breaking out, both in
the upper and in the lower classes of society; the school could not
suppress nature altogether. It was no trifle even to know the six
hundred and thirteen commandments of the written law, and the
incalculable number of the unwritten. Religion had to be made a
profession of, if it was to be practiced aright. It became an art,
and thereby at the same time a matter of party:, the leaders of the
religious were of course the scribes. The division became very apparent
in the time of the Hellenization which preceded the Maccabaean revolt;
at that period the name of Pharisees, i.e., the Separated, came
into vogue for the party of the religious. But the separation and
antipathy between the godly and the ungodly had existed before
this, and had marked the life of the congregation after the exile
from the very first.
It was the law that gave the Jewish religion its peculiar
character. But, on the other hand, a hope was not wanting to that
religion; the Jews cherished the prospect of a reward for the
fulfilling of the law. This hope attached itself to the old
prophecies, certainly in a very fantastic way. The Jews had no
historical life, and therefore painted the old time according to
their ideas, and framed the time to come according to their wishes.
They stood in no living relation with either the past or the
future; the present was not with them a bridge from the
one to the other; they did not think of bestirring themselves
with a view to the kingdom of God. They had no national and
historical existence, and made no preparations to procure such a
thing for themselves; they only hoped for it as a reward of
faithful keeping of the law. Yet they dreamed not only of a
restoration of the old kingdom, but of the erection of a universal
world-monarchy, which should raise its head at Jerusalem over the
ruins of the heathen empires. They regarded the history of the
world as a great suit between themselves and the heathen. In this
suit they were in the right; and they waited for right to be
done them. If the decision was delayed, their sins were the
reason; Satan was accusing them before the throne of God, and
causing the judgment to be postponed. They were subjected to hard
trials, and if tribulation revived their hopes, with much greater
certainty did it bring their sins into sorrowful remembrance.
Outward circumstances still influenced in the strongest way
their religious mood.
But the old belief in retribution which sought to justify itself
in connection with the fortunes of the congregation proved here
also unequal to the strain laid upon it. Even in Deuteronomy it
is maintained that the race is not to suffer for the act of an
individual. Jeremiah's contemporaries thought it monstrous that
because the fathers had eaten sour grapes the teeth of the children
should be set on edge. Ezekiel championed in a notable way the
cause of individualism on this ground. He denounced the Jews who
had remained in Palestine, and who regarded themselves as the
successors of the people of Jehovah because they dwelt in the Holy
Land and had maintained some sort of existence as a people. In his
view only those souls which were saved from the dispersion of the
exile were to count as heirs of the promise; the theocracy was
not to be perpetuated by the nation, but by the individual
righteous men. He maintained that each man lived because of his
own righteousness, and died because of his own wickedness; nay
more, the fate of the individual corresponded even in its
fluctuations to his moral worth at successive times. The aim he
pursued in this was a good one; in view of a despair which thought
there was nothing for it but to pine and rot away because of
former sins, he was anxious to maintain the freedom of the will,
ie., the possibility of repentance and forgiveness. But the way
he chose for this end was not a good one; on his showing it was
chance which ultimately decided who was good and who was wicked.
The old view of retribution which allowed time for judgment to
operate far beyond the limit of the individual life had truth in it,
but this view had none. Yet it possessed one merit, that it brought
up a problem which had to be faced, and which was a subject of
reflection for a long time afterwards.
The problem assumed the form of a controversy as to the principle
on which piety was rewarded--this controversy taking the place of
the great contest between Israel and the heathen. Were the wicked
right in saying that there was no God, i.e., that He did not rule
and judge on earth? Did He in truth dwell behind the clouds, and
did He not care about the doings of men? In that case piety
would be an illusion. Piety cannot maintain itself if God makes
no difference between the godly and the wicked, and has nothing
more to say to the one than to the other; for piety is not
content to stretch out its hands to the empty air, it must meet an
arm descending from heaven. It must have a reward, not for the
sake of the reward, but in order to be sure of its own reality, in
order to know that there is a communion of God with men and a road
which leads to it. The usual form of this reward is the
forgiveness of sins; that is the true motive of the fear of God.
That is to say, as long as it is well with him, the godly man does
not doubt, and so does not require any unmistakable evidence by
which he may be justified and assured of the favour of God. But
misfortune and pain destroy this certainty. They are accusers
of sin, God's warnings and corrections. Now is the time to hold
fast the faith that God leads the godly to repentance, and
destroys the wicked, that He forgives the sin of the former, but
punishes and avenges that of the latter. But this faith involves a
hope of living to see better things; the justification of which
the good man is sure must at last be attested by an objective
judgment of God before the whole world, and the godly delivered
from his sufferings. Hence the constant anxiety and restlessness
of his conscience; the judgment passed upon him is ultimately
to be gathered from the external world, and he can never be sure
how it is to turn out. And a principle is also at stake the whole
time, namely, the question whether godliness or ungodliness is
right in its fundamental conviction. Each individual case at once
affects the generality, the sufferings of one godly person touch
all the godly. When he recovers and is saved, they triumph; when
he succumbs, or seems to succumb, to death, they are cast down,
unless in this case they should change their minds about him and hold
him to be a hypocrite whom God has judged and unmasked. In the same
way, they are all hurt at the prosperity of an ungodly man, and
rejoice together at his fall, not from jealousy or pleasure in
misfortune for its own sake, but because in the one case their
faith is overturned, while in the other it is confirmed.
The tortures incident to this curious oscillation between believing
and seeing are set forth in the most trenchant way in the Book of
Job. Job, placed in an agonizing situation, condemned without hope
to the death of sinners, and yet conscious of his godliness,
demands vengeance for his blood unjustly shed. But the
vengeance is to be executed on God, and in such a case who can be
the avenger? There is no one but God Himself, and thus the
striking thought arises, that God will be the champion against God
of his innocence, after having first murdered it. From the God of
the present he appeals to the God of the future; but the identity
between these two is yet maintained, and even now the God who slays
him is the sole witness of his innocence, in which the world and
his friends have ceased to believe. God must be this now if He is to
avenge him in the future. An inner antinomy is in this way
impersonated; the view of the friends is one of which the sufferer
himself cannot divest himself; hence the conflict in his soul.
But, supported by the unconquerable power of his good conscience,
he struggles till he frees himself from the delusion; he believes
more firmly in the direct testimony of his conscience than in the
evidence of facts and the world's judgment about him, and against
the dreadful God of reality, the righteous God of faith
victoriously asserts Himself.
Job in the end reaches the conclusion that he cannot understand
God's ways. This is a negative expression of the position that he
holds fast, in spite of all, to himself and to God; that is to
say, that not outward experience, but inner feeling, is to
decide. This inner feeling of the union of God with the godly
meets us also in some of the Psalms, where, in spite of depression
arising from untoward circumstances, it maintains itself as a
reality which cannot be shaken, which temptations and doubts even
tend to strengthen. It was a momentous step when the soul in its
relations to God ventured to take its stand upon itself, to trust
itself. This was an indirect product of prophecy, but one of not
less importance than its direct product, the law. The prophets
declared the revelation of God, which had authority for all, but
along with this they had their own personal experience, and the
subjective truth of which they thus became aware proved a more
powerful solvent and emancipator than the objective one which formed
the subject of their revelation. They preached the law to deaf ears,
and laboured in vain to convert the people. But if their labour had
produced no outward result, it had an inner result for them.
Rejected by the people, they clung the more closely to Jehovah,
in the conviction that the defeated cause was favoured by Him,
that He was with them and not with the people. Especially with
Jeremiah did prophecy, which is designed primarily to act on
others, transform itself into an inner converse with the Deity,
which lifted him above all the annoyances of his life. In this
relation, however, there was nothing distinctively prophetical,
just because it was a matter of the inner life alone, and was
sufficient for itself; it was just the essence of the life of
religion that the prophets thus brought to view and helped to
declare itself. The experience of Jeremiah propagated itself and
became the experience of religious Israel. This was the power by
which Israel was enabled to rise again after every fall; the good
conscience towards God, the profound sentiment of union with Him,
proved able to defy all the blows of outward fortune. In this
strength the servant, despised and slain, triumphed over the world;
the broken and contrite heart was clothed and set on high with the
life and power of the Almighty God. This divine spirit of
assurance rises to its boldest expression in the 73rd Psalm:
"Nevertheless I am continually with Thee;
Thou holdest me by my right hand;
Thou guidest me with Thy counsel,
and drawest me after Thee by the hand.
If I have Thee, I desire not heaven nor earth;
if my flesh and my heart fail,
Thou, God, art for ever the strength of my heart, and my portion."
The life surrendered is here found again in a higher life, without
any expression of hope of a hereafter. In the Book of Job we do
indeed find a trace of this hope, in the form that even after the
death of the martyr, God may still find opportunity to justify
him and pronounce him innocent; yet this idea is only touched on
as a distant possibility, and is at once dropped. Certainly the
position of that man is a grand one who can cast into the scale
against death and devil his inner certainty of union with God--
so grand indeed that we must in honesty be ashamed to repeat those
words of the 73d Psalm. But the point of view is too high.
The danger was imminent of falling from it down into the dust
and seeking comfort and support in the first earthly experience
that might offer, or, on the other hand, sinking into despair.
Subjective feeling was not enough of itself to outbid the
contradictions of nature; the feeling must take an objective form,
a world other than this one, answering the demands of morality,
must build itself up to form a contrast to the world actually
existing. The merit of laying the foundations for this
religious metaphysic which the time called for belongs, if not to
the Pharisees themselves, at least to the circles from which they
immediately proceeded. The main features of that metaphysic first
appear in the Book of Daniel, where we find a doctrine of the last
things. We have already spoken of the transition from the old
prophecy to apocalypse. With the destruction of the nation and
the cessation of historical life, hope was released from all
obligation to conform to historical conditions; it no longer set
up an aim to which even the present might aspire, but ran riot
after an ideal, at the advent of which the historical development
would be suddenly broken off. To be pious was all the Jews could
do at the time; but it caused them bitter regret that they had no
part in the government of the world, and in thought they anticipated
the fulfilment of their wishes. These they raised to an ever-higher
pitch in proportion as their antagonism to the heathen became more
pronounced, and as the world became more hostile to them and they
to the world. As the heathen empires stood in the way of the
universal dominion of Israel, the whole of them together were
regarded as one power, and this world-empire was then set over
against the kingdom of God, i.e., of Israel. The kingdom of God
was entirely future; the fulfilling of the law did not prepare the
way for it, but was only a statutory condition for its coming,
not related to it inwardly as cause to effect. History was suddenly
to come to a stop and cease. The Jews counted the days to the
judgment; the judgment was the act by which God would at once realise
all their wishes. The view thus taken of the world's history was a
very comprehensive one and well worked out from its principle, yet
of an entirely negative character; the further the world's history
went wilfully away from its goal, the nearer did it unintentionally
approach its goal. In this view, moreover, the earth always continued
to be the place of hope; the kingdom of God was brought by the judgment
into earthly history; it was on earth that the ideal was to be
realised. A step further, and the struggle of the dualism of the
earth was preluded in the skies by the angels, as the representatives
of the different powers and nations. In this struggle a place was
assigned to Satan; at first he was merely the accuser whom God Himself
had appointed, and in this character he drew attention to the sins
of the Jews before God's judgment-seat, and thereby delayed the judicial
sentence in their favour; but ultimately (though this took place late,
and is not met with in the Book of Daniel) he came to be the independent
leader of the power opposed to God, God's cause being identified
with that of the Jews. But as this prelude of the struggle took
place in heaven, its result was also anticipated. The kingdom of
God is on earth a thing of the future, but even now it is preserved
in heaven with all its treasures, one day to descend from there to
the earth. Heaven is the place where the good things of the future
are kept, which are not and yet must be; that is its original and
true signification. But the most important question came at last
to be, how individuals were to have part in the glory of the
future? How was it with the martyrs who had died in the
expectation of the kingdom of God, before it came? The doctrine of
the _zakuth_ was formed: if their merit was not of service to
themselves, it was yet of service to others. But this was a
solution with which individualism could not rest content. And what
of the ungodly? Were they to escape from wrath because they
died before the day of judgment? It was necessary that the
departed also should be allowed to take some part in the coming
retribution. Thus there arose--it is remarkable how late and how
slowly--the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, that the
kingdom of God might not be of service only to those who happened
to be alive at the judgment. Yet at first this doctrine was only
used to explain particularly striking cases. The Book of Daniel
says nothing of a general resurrection, but speaks in fact only of
a resurrection of the martyrs and a punishment of the wicked after
death. With all this the resurrection is not the entrance to a
life above the earth but to a second earthly life, to a world in
which it is no longer the heathen but the Jews who bear rule and
take the lead. Of a general judgment at the last day, or of heaven
and hell in the Christian sense, the Jews know nothing, though
these ideas might so easily have suggested themselves to them.
It is not easy to find points of view from which to pronounce on
the character of Judaism. It is a system, but a practical system,
which can scarcely be set forth in relation to one leading
thought, as it is an irregular product of history. It lives on the
stores of the past, but is not simply the total of what had been
previously acquired; it is full of new impulses, and has an
entirely different physiognomy from that of Hebrew antiquity,
so much so that it is hard even to catch a likeness. Judaism is
everywhere historically comprehensible, and yet it is a mass of
antinomies. We are struck with the free flight of thought and the
deep inwardness of feeling which are found in some passages in the
Wisdom and in the Psalms; but, on the other hand, we meet with a
pedantic asceticism which is far from lovely, and with pious
wishes the greediness of which is ill-concealed; and these
unedifying features are the dominant ones of the system.
Monotheism is worked out to its furthest consequences, and at the
same time is enlisted in the service of the narrowest selfishness;
Israel participates in the sovereignty of the One God. The
Creator of heaven and earth becomes the manager of a petty scheme
of salvation; the living God descends from His throne to make way
for the law. The law thrusts itself in everywhere; it commands
and blocks up the access to heaven; it regulates and sets limits
to the understanding of the divine working on earth. As far as it
can, it takes the soul out of religion and spoils morality. It
demands a service of God, which, though revealed, may yet with truth
be called a self-chosen and unnatural one, the sense and use of which
are apparent neither to the understanding nor the heart. The labour
is done for the sake of the exercise; it does no one any good, and
rejoices neither God nor man. It has no inner aim after which it
spontaneously strives and which it hopes to attain by itself, but
only an outward one, namely, the reward attached to it, which
might as well be attached to other and possibly even more curious
conditions. The ideal is a negative one, to keep one's self from
sin, not a positive one, to do good upon the earth; the morality
is one which scarcely requires for its exercise the existence of
fellow-creatures. Now pious exercises can dam up life and hold it
in bounds, they may conquer from it more and more ground, and at
last turn it into one great Sabbath, but they cannot penetrate it
at the root. The occupation of the hands and the desire of the
heart fall asunder. What the hands are doing has nothing in common
with the earth, and bears no reference to earthly objects; but
with the Jews the result of this is that their hope assumes a more
worldly complexion. There is no connection between the Good One
and goodness. There are exceptions, but they disappear in the
system.
The Gospel develops hidden impulses of the Old Testament, but it is
a protest against the ruling tendency of Judaism. Jesus understands
monotheism in a different way from his contemporaries. They think
in connection with it of the folly of the heathen and their great
happiness in calling the true God their own; He thinks of the claims,
not to be disputed or avoided, which the Creator makes on the creature.
He feels the reality of God dominating the whole of life, He breathes
in the fear of the Judge who requires an account for every idle word,
and has power to destroy body and soul in hell. "No man can serve two
masters; ye cannot serve God and Mammon; where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also." This monotheism is not to be satisfied with
stipulated services, how many and great soever; it demands the whole
man, it renders doubleness of heart and hypocrisy impossible. Jesus
casts ridicule on the works of the law, the washing of hands and
vessels, the tithing of mint and cummin, the abstinence even from
doing good on the Sabbath. Against unfruitful self-sanctification
He sets up another principle of morality, that of the service of one's
neighbour. He rejects that lofty kind of goodness, which says to father
and mother, If I dedicate what I might give to you, that will be best
even for you yourselves; He contends for the weightier matters in the
law, for the common morality which sees its aim in the furtherance of
the well-being of others, and which commends itself at once to the
heart of every one. Just this natural morality of self-surrender
does He call the law of God; that supernatural morality which thinks
to outbid this, He calls the commandment of men. Thus religion
ceases to be an art which the Rabbis and Pharisees understand better
than the unlearned people which know nothing of the law. The
arrogance of the school fares ill at the hands of Jesus; He will
know nothing of the partisanship of piety or of the separateness
of the godly; He condemns the practice of judging a man's value
before God. Holiness shrinks from contact with sinners, but He
helps the world of misery and sin; and there is no commandment
on which He insists more than that of forgiving others their debts
as one hopes for forgiveness himself from heaven. He is most
distinctly opposed to Judaism in His view of the kingdom of heaven,
not as merely the future reward of the worker, but as the present
goal of effort, it being the supreme duty of man to help it to
realise itself on earth, from the individual outwards. Love is
the means, and the community of love the end.
Self-denial is the chief demand of the Gospel; it means the same
thing as that repentance which must precede entrance into the
kingdom of God. The will thereby breaks away from the chain of
its own acts, and makes an absolutely new beginning not conditioned
by the past. The causal nexus which admits of being traced comes
here to an end, and the mutual action, which cannot be analysed,
between God and the soul begins. Miracle does not require to be
understood, only to be believed, in order to take place. With men
it is impossible, but with God it is possible. Jesus not only
affirmed this, but proved it in His own person. The impression of
His personality convinced the disciples of the fact of the
forgiveness of their sins and of their second birth, and gave them
courage to believe in a new divine life and to live it. He had in
fact lost His life and saved it; He could do as he would. He had
escaped the limits of the race and the pains of self-seeking
nature; He had found freedom and personality in God, who alone is
master of Himself, and lifts those up to Himself who seek after
Him.
Jesus works in the world and for the world, but with His faith He
stands above the world and outside it. He can sacrifice Himself
for the world because He asks nothing from the world, but has
attained in retirement with God to equanimity and peace of soul.
And further, the entirely supra-mundane position, at which Jesus
finds courage and love to take an interest in the world, does not
lead Him to anything strained or unnatural. He trusts God's
Providence, and resigns Himself to His will, He takes up the
attitude of a child towards Him, and loves best to call Him the
Heavenly Father. The expression is simple, but the thing
signified is new. He first knows Himself, not in emotion but in
sober quietness, to be God's child; before Him no one ever felt
himself to be so, or called himself so. He is the first-born of
the Father, yet, according to His own view, a first-born among
many brethren. For He stands in this relation to God not because
His nature is unique, but because He is man; He uses always and
emphatically this general name of the race to designate His own
person. In finding the way to God for Himself He has opened it to
all; along with the nature of God He has at the same time
discovered in Himself the nature of man.
Eternity extends into the present with Him, even on earth He lives
in the midst of the kingdom of God; even the judgment He sees
inwardly accomplished here below in the soul of man. Yet He is
far from holding the opinion that he who loves God aright does not
desire that God should love him in return. He teaches men to bear
the cross, but he does not teach that the cross is sweet and that
sickness is sound. A coming reconciliation between believing and
seeing, between morality and nature, everywhere forms the
background of His view of the world; even if He could have done
without it for His own person, yet it is a thing He takes for
granted, as it is an objective demand of righteousness. So much is
certain; for the rest the eschatology of the New Testament is so
thoroughly saturated with the Jewish ideas of the disciples, that
it is difficult to know what of it is genuine.
Jesus was so full of new and positive ideas that He did not feel
any need for breaking old idols, so free that no constraint could
depress Him, so unconquerable that even under the load of the
greatest accumulations of rubbish He could still breathe. This
ought ye to do, He said, and not to leave the other undone; He did
not seek to take away one iota, but only to fulfil. He never
thought of leaving the Jewish community. The Church is not His
work, but an inheritance from Judaism to Christianity. Under the
Persian domination the Jews built up an unpolitical community on
the basis of religion. The Christians found themselves in a
position with regard to the Roman Empire precisely similar to that
which the Jews had occupied with regard to the Persian; and so
they also founded, after the Jewish pattern, in the midst of the
state which was foreign and hostile to them, and in which they
could not feel themselves at home, a religious community as
their true fatherland. The state is always the presupposition of
the Church; but it was at first, in the case both of the Jewish
and of the Christian Church, a foreign state. The original meaning
of the Church thus disappeared when it no longer stood over against
the heathen world-power, it having become possible for the
Christians also to possess a natural fatherland in the nation.
In this way it became much more difficult to define accurately the
spheres of the state and the Church respectively, regarding the
Church as an organisation, not as an invisible community of the
faithful. The distinction of religious and secular is a variable
one; every formation of a religious community is a step towards
the secularisation of religion; the religion of the heart alone
remains an inward thing. The tasks of the two competing
organisations are not radically different in their nature; on the
one side it may be said that had not the Christian religion found
civil order already in existence, had it come, like Islam, in
contact with the anarchy of Arabia instead of the Empire of Rome
it must have founded not the Church, but the state; on the other
side it is well known that the state has everywhere entered into
possession of fields first reclaimed to cultivation by the Church.
Now we must acknowledge that the nation is more certainly created
by God than the Church, and that God works more powerfully in the
history of the nations than in Church history. The Church, at
first a substitute for the nation which was wanting, is affected by
the same evils incident to an artificial cultivation as meet us in
Judaism. We cannot create for ourselves our sphere of life and
action; better that it should be a natural one, given by God.
And yet it would be unjust to deny the permanent advantages of
the differentiation of the two. The Church will always be able
to work in advance for the state of the future. The present state
unfortunately is in many respects only nothing more than a barrier
to chaos; if the Church has still a task, it is that of preparing
an inner unity of practical conviction, and awakening a sentiment,
first in small circles, that we belong to each other.
Whether she is to succeed in this task is certainly the question.
The religious individualism of the Gospel is, and must remain for
all time, the true salt of the earth. The certainty that neither
death nor life can separate us from the love of God drives out that
fear which is opposed to love; an entirely supra-mundane faith
lends courage for resultless self-sacrifice and resigned obedience
on earth. We must succeed: _sursum corda_!
12. THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD.
Palestine fell into Alexander's possession in 332; after his death
it had an ample share of the troubles arising out of the partition
of his inheritance. In 320 it was seized by Ptolemy I., who on a
Sabbath-day took Jerusalem; but in 3I5 he had to give way before
Antigonus. Even before the battle of Ipsus, however, he recovered
possession once more, and for a century thereafter Southern Syria
continued to belong to the Egyptian crown, although the Seleucidae
more than once sought to wrench it away.
In the priestly dynasty during the period of the Ptolemies, Onias
I. ben Jaddua was succeeded by his son Simon I., after whom
again came first his brothers Eleazar and Manasseh, and next his
son Onias II.; the last-named was in his turn followed by his son
Simon II., whose praises are sung by the son of Sirach (xlix. 14-16).
At the side of the high priest stood the gerusia of the town of
Jerusalem, as a council of state, including the higher ranks of the
priesthood. The new sovereign power was at once stronger and
juster than the Persian,--at least under the earlier Ptolemies;
the power of the national government increased; to it was
intrusted the business of raising the tribute.
As a consequence of the revolutionary changes which had taken
place in the conditions of the whole East, the Jewish dispersion
(diaspora) began vigorously to spread. It dated its beginning
indeed from an earlier period,--from the time when the Jews had lost
their land and kingdom, but yet, thanks to their religion, could
not part with their nationality. They did not by any means all
return from Babylon; perhaps the majority permanently settled
abroad. The successors of Alexander (diadochi) fully appreciated
this international element, and used it as a link between their
barbarian and Hellenic populations. Everywhere they encouraged
the settlement of Jews,--in Asia Minor, in Syria, and especially
in Egypt. Alongside of the Palestinian there arose a Hellenistic
Judaism which had its metropolis in Alexandria. Here, under
Ptolemy I. and II., the Torah had already been translated into
Greek, and around this sprung up a Jewish-Greek literature which
soon became very extensive. At the court and in the army of the
Ptolemies many Jews rose to prominent positions; everywhere they
received the preference over, and everywhere they in consequence
earned the hatred of, the indigenous population.
After the death of Ptolemy IV. (205) Antiochus III. attained the
object towards which he and his predecessors had long been vainly
striving; after a war protracted with varying success through
several years, he succeeded at last in incorporating Palestine with
the kingdom of the Seleucidae. The Jews took his side, less perhaps
because they had become disgusted with the really sadly
degenerate Egyptian rule, than because they had foreseen the issue
of the contest, and preferred to attach themselves voluntarily to
the winning side. In grateful acknowledgment, Antiochus
confirmed and enlarged certain privileges of the "holy camp,"
i.e., of Jerusalem (Josephus, Antiquities, xii. 3, 3). It soon,
however, became manifest that the Jews had made but a poor bargain
in this exchange. Three years after his defeat at Magnesia,
Antiochus III. died (187), leaving to his son Seleucus IV. an immense
burden of debt, which he had incurred by his unprosperous Roman
war. Seleucus, in his straits, could not afford to be over-scrupulous
in appropriating money where it was to be found: he did not need to
be twice told that the wealth of the temple at Jerusalem was out of
all proportion to the expenses of the sacrificial service. The
sacred treasure accordingly made the narrowest possible escape
from being plundered; Heliodorus, who had been charged by the
king to seize it, was deterred at the last moment by a heavenly
vision. But the Jews derived no permanent advantage from this.
It was a priest of rank, Simon by name, who had called the
attention of the king to the temple treasure; his motive had been
spite against the high priest Onias III., the son and successor of
Simon II. The circumstance is one indication of a melancholy
process of disintegration that was at that time going on within the
hierocracy. The high-priesthood, although there were exceptional
cases, such as that of Simon II., was regarded less as a sacred
office than as a profitable princedom; within the ranks of the
priestly nobility arose envious and jealous factions; personal
advancement was sought by means of the favour of the overlord, who
had something to say in the making of appointments. A collateral
branch of the ruling family, that of the children of Tobias, had by
means of the ill-gotten wealth of Joseph ben Tobias attained to a
position of ascendancy, and competed in point of power with the
high priest himself. It appears that the above-mentioned Simon,
and his still more scandalous brother AIenelaus, also belonged to
the Tobiadae, and, relying upon the support of their powerful party
(Josephus, Antiquities, xii. 5, 1), cherished the purpose of securing
the high-priesthood by the aid of the Syrian king.
The failure of the mission of Heliodorus was attributed by Simon
to a piece of trickery on the part of Onias the high priest, who
accordingly found himself called upon to make his own
justification at court and to expose the intrigues of his
adversary. Meanwhile Seleucus IV. died of poison (175), and
Antiochus IV. Epiphanes did not confirm Onias in his dignity,
but detained him in Antioch, while he made over the office to his
brother Jason, who had offered a higher rent. Possibly the
Tobiadae also had something to do with this arrangement; at all
events, Menelaus was at the outset the right hand of the new high
priest. To secure still further the favour of the king, Jason held
himself out to be an enlightened friend of the Greeks, and begged
for leave to found in Jerusalem a gymnasium and an ephebeum, and to
be allowed to sell to the inhabitants there the rights of citizenship
in Antioch,--a request which was readily granted.
The malady which had long been incubating now reached its acute
phase. Just in proportion as Hellenism showed itself friendly did
it present elements of danger to Judaism. From the periphery it
slowly advanced towards the centre, from the diaspora to
Jerusalem, from mere matters of external fashion to matters of the
most profound conviction. /1/ Especially did the upper and cultivated
*************************************
1. The Hellenising fashion is amusingly exemplified in the Grecising
of the Jewish names; e.g., Alcimus = Eljakim, Jason = Jesus, Joshua;
Menelaus = Menahem.
****************************************
classes of society begin to feel ashamed, in presence of the
refined Greeks, of their Jewish singularity, and to do all in
their power to tone it down and conceal it. In this the priestly
nobility made itself conspicuous as the most secular section of
the community, and it was the high priest who took the initiative
in measures which aimed at a complete Hellenising of the Jews. He
outdid every one else in paganism. Once he sent a considerable
present for offerings to the Syrian Hercules on the occasion of his
festival; but his messenger, ashamed to apply the money to such
a purpose, set it apart for the construction of royal ships of war.
The friendship shown by Jason for the Greek king and for all that
was Hellenic did not prevent Antiochus IV. from setting pecuniary
considerations before all others. Menelaus, intrusted with the
mission of conveying to Antioch the annual Jewish tribute, availed
himself of the opportunity to promote his own personal interests
by offering a higher sum for the high-priesthood, and having
otherwise ingratiated himself with the king, gained his object
(171). But though nominated, he did not find it quite easy to
obtain possession of the post. The Tobiadae took his side, but the
body of the people stuck to Jason, who was compelled to give way
only when Syrian troops had been brought upon the scene. Menelaus
had immediately, however, to encounter another difficulty, for he
could not at once pay the amount of tribute which he had promised.
He helped himself so far indeed by robbing the temple, but this
landed him in new embarrassments. Onias III., who was living out
of employment at Antioch, threatened to make compromising revelations
to the king; he was, however, opportunely assassinated.
The rage of the people against the priestly temple-plunderer now
broke out in a rising against a certain Lysimachus, who at the
instance of the absent Menelaus had made further inroads upon the
sacred treasury. The Jews' defence before the king (at Tyre) on
account of this uproar resolved itself into a grievous complaint
against the conduct of Menelaus. His case was a bad one, but money
again helped him out of his straits, and the extreme penalty of the
law fell upon his accusers.
The feelings of the Jews with reference to this wolfish shepherd
may easily be imagined. Nothing but fear of Antiochus held them
in check. Then a report gained currency that the king had
perished in an expedition against Egypt (170); and Jason, who
meanwhile had found refuge in Ammanitis, availed himself of the
prevailing current of feeling to resume his authority with the
help of one thousand men. He was not able, however, to hold the
position long, partly because he showed an unwise vindictiveness
against his enemies, partly (and chiefly) because the rumour of
the death of Antiochus turned out to be false. The king was
already, in fact, close at hand on his return from Egypt, full of
anger at an insurrection which he regarded as having been directed
against himself. He inflicted severe and bloody chastisement
upon Jerusalem, carried off the treasures of the temple, and
restored Menelaus, placing Syrian officials at his side. Jason
fled from place to place, and ultimately died in misery at
Lacedaemon.
The deepest despondency prevailed in Judaea; but its cup of
sorrow was not yet full. Antiochus, probably soon after his last
Egyptian expedition (168), sent Apollonius with an army against
Jerusalem. He fell upon the unsuspecting city, disarmed the
inhabitants and demolished the walls, but on the other hand
fortified Acra, and garrisoned it strongly, so as to make it a
standing menace to the whole country. Having thus made his
preparations, he proceeded to carry out his main instructions.
All that was religiously distinctive of Judaism was to be removed;
such was the will of the king. The Mosaic cultus was abolished,
Sabbath observance and the rite of circumcision prohibited, all
copies of the Torah confiscated and burnt. In the desecrated and
partially-destroyed temple pagan ceremonies were performed, and
upon the great altar of burnt-offering a small altar to Jupiter
Capitolinus was erected, on which the first offering was made on
25th Kislev 168. In the country towns also heathen altars were
erected, and the Jews compelled, on pain of death, publicly to
adore the false gods and to eat swine's flesh that had been
sacrificed to idols.
The princes and grandees of the Jews had represented to Antiochus
that the people were ripe for Hellenisation; and inasmuch as,
apart from this, to reduce to uniformity the extremely motley
constituents of his kingdom was a scheme that lay near his heart,
he was very willing to believe them. That the very opposite was
the case must of course have become quite evident very soon; but
the resistance of the Jews taking the form of rebellious risings
against his creatures, he fell upon the hopeless plan of
coercion,--hopeless, for he could attain his end only by making
all Judaea one vast graveyard. There existed indeed a pagan party;
the Syrian garrison of Acra was partly composed of Jews who sold
themselves to be the executioners of their countrymen. Fear also
influenced many to deny their convictions; but the majority
adhered firmly to the religion of their fathers. Jerusalem,
the centre of the process of Hellenisation, was abandoned by its
inhabitants, who made their escape to Egypt, or hid themselves in
the country, in deserts and caves. The scribes in especial held
fast by the law; and they were joined by the party of the
Asidaeans (i.e., pious ones).
13. THE HASMONAEANS.
At first there was no thought of meeting violence with violence;
as the Book of Daniel shows, people consoled themselves with
thoughts of the immediate intervention of God which would occur in
due time. Quite casually, without either plan or concert, a
warlike opposition arose. There was a certain priest Mattathias,
of the family of the Hasmonaeans, a man far advanced in life,
whose home was in Modein, a little country town to the west of
Jerusalem. Hither also the Syrian soldiers came to put the
population to a positive proof of their change of faith; they
insisted upon Mattathias leading the way. But he was steadfast in
his refusal; and, when another Jew addressed himself before his
eyes to the work of making the heathen offering, he killed him and
the Syrian officer as well, and destroyed the altar. Thereupon he
fled to the hill country, accompanied by his sons (Johannes Gaddi,
Simon Thassi, Judas Maccabaeus, Eleazar Auaran, Jonathan Apphus)
and other followers. But he resolved to defend himself to the
last, and not to act as some other fugitives had done, who about
the same time had allowed themselves to be surrounded and butchered
on a Sabbath-day without lifting a finger. Thus he became the head
of a band which defended the ancestral religion with the sword.
They traversed the country, demolished the altars of the false gods,
circumcised the children, and persecuted the heathen and heathenishly
disposed. The sect of the Asidaeans also intrusted itself to their
warlike protection (1Maccabees ii. 42).
Mattathias soon died and left his leadership to Judas Maccabaeus,
by whom the struggle was carried on in the first instance after
the old fashion; soon, however, it assumed larger dimensions, when
regular armies were sent out against the insurgents. First
Apollonius, the governor of Judaea, took the field; but he was
defeated and fell in battle. Next came Seron, governor of
Ccelesyria, who also was routed near Bethhoron (I66). Upon this
Lysias, the regent to whom Antiochus IV., who was busied in the far
east, had intrusted the government of Syria and the charge of his
son, Antiochus Philopator, a minor, sent a strong force under the
command of three generals. Approaching from the west, it was their
design to advance separately upon Jerusalem, but Judas anticipated
their plan and compelled them to quit the field (166). The regent
now felt himself called on to interpose in person. Invading Judaea
from the south, he encountered the Jews at Bethsur, who, however,
offered an opposition that was not easily overcome; he was
prevented from resorting to the last measures by the intelligence
which reached him of the death of the king in Elymais (165).
The withdrawal of Lysias secured the fulfilment of the desires of
the defenders of the faith in so far as it now enabled them to
restore the Jerusalem worship to its previous condition. They
lost no time in setting about the accomplishment of this. They
were not successful indeed in wresting Acra from the possession of
the Syrians, but they so occupied the garrison as to prevent it
from interfering with the work of restoration. On 25th Kislev 165,
the very day on which, three years before, "the abomination of
desolation" had been inaugurated, the first sacrifice was offered
on the new altar, and in commemoration of this the feast of the
dedication was thenceforth celebrated.
As it was easy to see that danger still impended, the temple was
put into a state of defence, as also was the town of Bethsur, where
Lysias had been checked. But the favourable moment presented by
the change of sovereign was made use of for still bolder attempts.
Scattered over the whole of Southern Syria there were a number of
Jewish localities on which the heathens now proceeded to wreak
their vengeance.
For the purpose of rescuing these oppressed co-religionists, and of
bringing them in safety to Judaea, the Maccabees made a series of
excursions, extending in some cases as far as to Lebanon and
Damascus. Lysias had his hands otherwise fully occupied, and
perhaps did not feel much disposed to continue the fight on behalf
of the cultus of Jupiter Capitolinus. Daily gaining in boldness,
the Jews now took in hand also to lay regular siege to Acra. Then
at last Lysias yielded to the pressure of Syrian and Jewish
deputations and determined to take serious steps (162). With a
large force he entered Judaea, again from the south, and laid siege
to Bethsur. Judas vainly attempted the relief of the fortress;
he sustained near Bethzachariah a defeat in which his brother Eleazar
perished. Bethsur was unable to hold out, being short of provisions
on account of the sabbatic year. The Syrians advanced next to Jerusalem
and besieged the temple; it also was insufficiently provisioned, and
would soon have been compelled to surrender, had not Lysias been again
called away at the critical moment by other exigencies. A certain
Philip was endeavouring to oust him from the regency; as it was
necessary for him to have his hands free in dealing with this new
enemy, he closed a treaty with the temple garrison and the people at
large, in accordance with which at once the political subjection
and the religious freedom of the Jews were to be maintained; Thus
the situation as it had existed before Antiochus IV. was restored.
Only no attempt was made to replace Menelaus as high priest and
ethnarch; this post was to be filled by Alcimus.
The concessions thus made by Lysias were inevitable; and even
King Demetrius I., son of Seleucus IV., who towards the end of 162
ascended the throne and caused both Lysias and his ward to be put
to death, had no thought of interfering with their religious
freedom. But the Maccabees desired something more than the _status
quo ante_; after having done their duty they were disinclined to
retire in favour of Alcimus, whose sole claim lay in his descent
from the old heathenishly-disposed high-priestly family. Alcimus
was compelled to invoke the assistance of the king, who caused him
to be installed by Bacchides. He was at once recognised by the
scribes and Asidaeans, for whom, with religious liberty, everything
they wished had been secured; the claims to supremacy made by
the Hasmonaeans were of no consequence to them. Doubtless the
masses also would ultimately have quietly accepted Alcimus, who of
course refrained from interference with either law or worship, had
he not abused the momentary power he derived from the presence of
Bacchides to take a foolish revenge. But the consequence of his
action was that, as soon as Bacchides had turned his back, Alcimus
was compelled to follow him. For the purpose of restoring him a
Syrian army once more invaded Judaea under Nicanor (I60), but
first at Kapharsalama and afterwards at Bethhoron was defeated by
Judas, and almost annihilated in the subsequent flight, Nicanor
himself being among the slain (13th Adar = Nicanor's day). Judas
was now at the acme of his prosperity; about this time he concluded
his (profitless) treaty with the Romans. But disaster was impending.
In the month of Nisan, barely a month after the defeat of Nicanor,
a new Syrian army under Bacchides entered Judaea from the north;
near Elasa, southward from Jerusalem, a decisive battle was fought
which was lost by Judas, and in which he himself fell.
The religious war properly so called had already been brought
once for all to an end by the convention of Lysias. If the
struggle continued to be carried on, it was not for the faith but
for the supremacy,--less in the interests of the community than in
those of the Hasmonaeans. After the death of Judas the secular
character which the conflict had assumed ever since 162 continually
became more conspicuous. Jonathan Apphus fought for his house, and
in doing so used thoroughly worldly means. The high-priesthood,
i.e., the ethnarchy, was the goal of his ambition. So long as
Alcimus lived, it was far from his reach. Confined to the rocky
fastnesses beside the Dead Sea, he had nothing for it but,
surrounded by his faithful followers, to wait for better times.
But on the death of Alcimus (159) the Syrians refrained from
appointing a successor, to obviate the necessity of always having
to protect him with military force. During the interregnum of
seven years which followed, Jonathan again came more and more to
the front, so that at last Bacchides concluded an armistice with
him on the basis of the _status quo_ (1Maccabees ix. 13). From his
residence at Michmash Jonathan now exercised a _de facto_ authority
over the entire nation.
When accordingly Alexander Balas, a reputed son of Antiochus IV.,
rose against Demetrius, both rivals exerted themselves to secure
the alliance of Jonathan, who did not fail to benefit by their
competition. First of all, Demetrius formally recognised him as
prince of Judah; in consequence of this he removed to Jerusalem,
and expelled the heathen and heathenishly disposed, who continued
to maintain a footing only in Acra and Bethsur. Next Alexander
Balas conferred on him the title of "high priest of the nation
and friend of the king;" in gratitude for which Jonathan went
over to his side (152). He remained loya], although Demetrius
now made larger offers; he was justified by the event, for
Demetrius I. had the worst of it and was slain (150). The
victorious Balas heaped honours upon Jonathan, who maintained
his fidelity, and fought successfully in his interests when
in I47 Demetrius II., the son of Demetrius I., challenged a
conflict. The high priest was unable indeed to prevent the
downfall of Alexander in 145; but Demetrius II., won by presents,
far from showing any hostility, confirmed him in his position
in consideration of a tribute of 300 talents.
Jonathan was grateful to the king, as he showed by going with 3000
men to his aid against the insurgent Antiochenes. But when the
latter drew back from his promise to withdraw the garrison from
Acra, he went over to the side of Trypho, who had set up a son of
Alexander Balas (Antiochus) as a rival. In the war which he now
waged as Seleucid-strategus against Demetrius he succeeded in
subduing almost the whole of Palestine. Meanwhile his brother
Simon remained behind in Judaea, mastered the fortress of Bethsur,
and resumed with great energy the siege of Acra. All this was
done in the names of Antiochus and Trypho, but really of course in
the interests of the Jews themselves. There were concluded also
treaties with the Romans and Lacedaemonians, certainly not to
the advantage of the Syrians.
Trypho sought now to get rid of the man whom he himself had made
so powerful. He treacherously seized and imprisoned Jonathan in
Ptolemais, and meditated an attack upon the leaderless country.
But on the frontier Simon, the last remaining son of Mattathias,
met him in force. All Trypho's efforts to break through proved
futile; after skirting all Judaea from west to south, without
being able to get clear of Simon, he at last withdrew to Peraea
without having accomplished anything. On the person of Jonathan,
whom he caused to be executed, he vented the spleen he felt on the
discovery that the cause for which that prince had fought was able
to gain the victory even when deprived of his help. Simon, in
point of fact, was Jonathan's equal as a soldier and his superior
as a ruler. He secured his frontier by means of fortresses, made
himself master of Acra (141), and understood how to enable the
people in time of peace to reap the advantages that result from
successful war; agriculture, industry, and commerce (from the
haven of Joppa) began to flourish vigorously. In grateful
recognition of his services the high-priesthood and the ethnarchy
were bestowed upon him as hereditary possessions by a solemn
assembly of the people, "until a trustworthy prophet should
arise."
Nominally the Seleucidae still continued to possess the
suzerainty. Simon naturally had detached himself from Trypho
and turned to Demetrius II., who confirmed him in his position,
remitted all arrears of tribute, and waived his rights for the
future (142). The friendship of Demetrius II. and of his
successor Antiochus Sidetes with Simon, however, lasted only as
long as Trypho still remained in the way. But, he once removed,
Sidetes altered his policy. He demanded of Simon the surrender of
Joppa, Gazara, and other towns, besides the citadel of Jerusalem,
as well as payment of all tribute resting due. The refusal of
these demands led to war, which in its earlier stages was carried
on with success, but the scales were turned after the murder of
Simon, when Sidetes in person took the field against John Hyrcanus,
Simon's son and successor. Jerusalem capitulated; in the
negotiations for peace the surrender of all the external
possessions of the Jews was insisted upon; the suzerainty of the
Syrians became once more a reality (I35). But in 130 the powerful
Antiochus Sidetes fell in an expedition against the Parthians, and
the complications anew arising in reference to the succession to
the Syrian throne placed Hyrcanus in a position to recover what he
had lost and to make new acquisitions. He subjugated Samaria
and Idumaea, compelling the inhabitants of the latter to accept
circumcision. Like his predecessors, he too sought to secure the
favour of the Romans, but derived no greater benefit from the
effort than they had done. After a prosperous reign of thirty
years he died in 105. By Josephus he is represented as a pattern
of all that a pious prince ought to be; by the rabbins as
representing a splendid high-priesthood. The darkness of the
succeeding age lent a brighter colour to his image.
The external splendour of the Hasmonaean kingdom did not at once
die away,--the downfall of the Seleucidae, which was its negative
condition, being also a slow affair. Judah Aristobulus, the son
of Hyrcanus, who reigned for only one year, was the first to
assume the Greek title of royalty; Ituraea was subdued by him,
and circumcision forced upon the inhabitants. His brother Jonathan
(Jannaeus) Alexander (104-79), in a series of continual wars,
which were never very prosperous, never-theless succeeded in adding
the whole coast of Philistia (Gaza) as well as a great portion of
Peraea to his hereditary dominions. /1/
*********************************************
1. A number of half-independent towns and communes lay as tempting
subjects of dispute between the Seleucidae, the Nabathaeans or
Arabs of Petra, and the Jews. The background was occupied by the
Parthians and the Romans.
********************************************
But the external enlargement of the structure was secured at the cost
of its internal consistency.
From the time when Jonathan, the son of Mattathias, began to carry
on the struggle no longer for the cause of God but for his own
interests, the scribes and the Asidaeans, as we have seen, had
withdrawn themselves from the party of the Maccabees There can
be no doubt that from their legal standpoint they were perfectly
right in contenting themselves, as they did, with the attainment
of religious liberty, and in accepting Alcimus. The Hasmonaeans
had no hereditary right to the high-priesthood, and their
politics, which aimed at the establishment of a national monarchy,
were contrary to the whole spirit and essence of the second
theocracy. The presupposition of that theocracy was foreign
domination; in no other way could its sacred--i.e., clerical--
character be maintained. God and the law could not but be
forced into the background if a warlike kingdom, retaining indeed
the forms of a hierocracy, but really violating its spirit at
every point, should ever grow out of a mere pious community.
Above all, how could the scribes hope to retain their importance
if temple and synagogue were cast into the shade by politics and
clash of arms? But under the first great Hasmonaeans the
zealots for the law were unable to force their way to the front;
the enthusiasm of the people was too strong for them; they had
nothing for it but to keep themselves out of the current and refuse
to be swept along by it. Even under Hyrcanus, however, they
gained more prominence, and under Jannaeus their influence upon
popular opinion was paramount. For under the last-named the
secularisation of the hierocracy no longer presented any
attractive aspects; it was wholly repellent. It was looked upon
as a revolting anomaly that the king, who was usually in the
field with his army, should once and again assume the sacred mantle
in order to perform the sacrifice on some high festival, and that
his officers, profane persons as they were, should at the same
time be holders of the highest spiritual offices. The danger which
in all this threatened "the idea of Judaism" could not in these
circumstances escape the observation of even the common people; for
this idea was God and the law, not any earthly fatherland. The
masses accordingly ranged themselves with ever-growing unanimity
on the side of the Pharisees (i.e., the party of the scribes) as
against the Sadducees (i.e., the Hasmonaean party). /1/
*****************************************
1. PRW# means "separated," and refers perhaps to the attitude of
isolation taken by the zealots for the law during the interval
between 162 and 105. CDWQY (*SADDOUKAIOS) comes from CDWQ (*SADDOUK,
LXX.) the ancestor of the higher priesthood of Jerusalem (1Kings ii.
35; 1Samuel ii. 35; Ezekiel xliv. 15), and designates the
governing nobility. The original character of the opposition, as
it appeared under Jannaeus, changed entirely with the lapse of
time, on account of the Sadducees' gradual loss of political
power, till they fell at last to the condition of a sort of "fronde."
On one occasion, when Alexander Jannaeus had returned to Jerusalem
at the feast of tabernacles, and was standing in his priestly
vestments before the altar to sacrifice, he was pelted by the
assembled crowd of worshippers with citrons from the green branches
they carried. By the cruelty with which he punished this insult
he excited the populace to the highest pitch, and, when he lost
his army in the disaster of Gadara, rebellion broke out. The
Pharisees summoned the Syrian king Demetrius Eucaerus; Jannaeus
was worsted and fled into the desert. But as he wandered in
helplessness there, the patriotism of the people and sympathy for
the heir of the Maccabees suddenly awoke; nature proved itself
stronger than that consistency which in the cause of the Divine
honour had not shrunk from treason. The insurgents for the most
part went over to the side of the fugitive king; the others he
ultimately overpowered after a struggle which lasted through
several years, Demetrius having withdrawn his intervention. The
vengeance which he took on the Pharisees was a bloody one; their
only escape was by voluntary exile. Thenceforward he had peace
so far as they were concerned. His last years were occupied with
the reacquisition of the conquests which he had been compelled to
yield to the Arabs during the civil war. He died in the field
at the siege of Ragaba in Peraea (79).
Under Queen Salome, his widow, matters were as if they had been
specially arranged for the satisfaction of the Pharisees. The
high-priesthood passed to Salome's son, Hyrcanus II.; she herself
was only queen. In the management of external affairs her
authority was absolute (Antiquities, xiii. 16, 6); in home policy
she permitted the scribes to wield a paramount influence. The
common assertion, indeed, that the synedrium was at that time
practically composed of scribes, is inconsistent with the known
facts of the case; the synedrium at that time was a political
and not a scholastic authority. /1/
*************************************
1. Kuenen, "Over de Samenstelling van het Sanhedrin," in
Proceedings of Royal Netherl. Acad., 1866.
**************************************
In its origin it was the municipal council of Jerusalem (so also
the councils of provincial towns are called synedria, Mark xiii. 9),
but its authority extended over the entire Jewish community;
alongside of the elders of the city the ruling priests were those
who had the greatest number of seats and votes. John Hyrcanus
appears to have been the first to introduce some scribes into its
composition; it is possible that Salome may have increased their
number, but even so this high court was far from being changed into
a college of scribes like that at Jamnia. If the domination of the
Pharisees at this time is spoken of, the expression cannot be
understood as meaning that they already held all the public
offices, but only at most that the holders of those offices found
it necessary to administer and to judge in their spirit and
according to their fundamental principles.
The party of the Sadducees (consisting of the old Hasmonaean
officers and officials, who were of priestly family indeed, but
attached only slight importance to their priestly functions) at
length lost all patience. Led by Aristobulus, the second son of
Jannaeus, the leaders of the party came to the palace, and begged
the queen to dismiss them from the court and to send them into the
provinces. There they were successful in securing possession of
several fortresses /2/ in preparation for insurrection, a favourable
*********************************************
2. Alexandrium, Coreae, and similar citadels, which were at that
time of great importance for Palestine and Syria.
*********************************************
opportunity for which they were watching. Such an opportunity
occurred, it seemed to Aristobulus, as his mother lay on her
death-bed. The commandants of the fortresses were at his orders,
and by their assistance an army also, with which he accordingly
advanced upon Jerusalem, and, on the death of Salome, made himself
master of the situation (69). Hyrcanus was compelled to resign
office. With this event the good understanding between the civil
government and the Pharisees came to an end; the old antagonisms
became active once more, and now began to operate for the advantage
of a third party, the Idumaean Antipater, Hyrcanus's confidential
friend. After the latter, aided by Antipater, had at length with
great difficulty got himself into a position for asserting his
rights against Aristobulus, the Pharisees could not do otherwise
than rank themselves upon his side, and the masses joined them
against the usurper. With the help of the Nabataean monarch the
effort to restore the elder brother to the supreme authority would
doubtless have succeeded had not the Romans procured relief for
Aristobulus, besieged as he was in Jerusalem (65), though without
thereby recognising his claims. Pompey continued to delay a decision
on the controversy in 64 also when the rival claimants presented
themselves before him at Damascus; he wished first to have the
Nabataeans disposed of, and to have free access to them through
Judaea. This hesitation roused the suspicions of Aristobulus;
still he did not venture to take decisive action upon them. He
closed the passes (to Mount Ephraim) against the Romans, but
afterwards gave them up; he prepared Jerusalem for war, and then
went in person to the Roman camp at Jericho, where he promised
to open the gates of the city and also to pay a sum of money.
But the Roman ambassadors found the gates barred, and had to
return empty-handed. Aristobulus thereupon was arrested, and
siege was laid to Jerusalem. The party of Hyrcanus, as soon
as it had gained the upper hand, surrendered the town; but the
supporters of Aristobulus took their stand in the temple, and
defended it obstinately. In June 63 the place was carried by
storm; Pompey personally inspected the Holy of Holies, but
otherwise spared the religious feelings of the Jews. But he
caused the chief promoters of the war to be executed, and carried
Aristobulus and his family into captivity. He abolished the
kingship, but restored the high-priestly dignity to Hyrcanus.
The territory was materially reduced in area, and made tributary
to the Romans; the city was occupied by a Roman garrison.
14. HEROD AND THE ROMANS.
Henceforward Roman intervention forms a constant disturbing factor
in Jewish history. The struggle between the Pharisees and the
Sadducees continued indeed to be carried on, but only because the
momentum of their old feud was not yet exhausted. The Pharisees in
a sense had been victorious. While the two brothers were pleading
their rival claims before Pompey, ambassadors from the Pharisees
had made their appearance in Damascus to petition for the abolition
of the kingship; this object had now to some extent been gained.
Less ambiguous than the victory of the Pharisees was the fall of
the Sadducees, who in losing the sovereignty of the Jewish state
lost all real importance. But the intervention of the foreign
element exercised its most powerful influence upon the temper of
the lower classes. Though in times of peace the masses still
continued to accept the guidance of the rabbins, their patriotism
instantly burst into flame as soon as a pretender to the throne,
belonging to the family of Aristobulus, appeared in Palestine.
During the decennia which immediately followed, Jewish history
was practically absorbed in vain attempts to restore the old
Hasmonaean kingdom. Insurrections of steadily increasing
dimensions were made in favour of Aristobulus, the representative
of the national cause. For Hyrcanus was not regarded as a
Hasmonaean at all, but merely as the creature of Antipater and the
Romans. First, in the year 57, Alexander the son of Aristobulus
broke into rebellion, then in 56 Aristobulus himself and his son
Antigonus, and in 55 Alexander again. Antipater was never able to
hold his own; Roman intervention was in every case necessary.
The division of the Hasmonaean state into five "aristocracies" by
Gabinius had no effect in diminishing the feeling of national unity
cherished by the Jews of Palestine. Once again, after the battle
of Carrhae, a rising took place, which Cassius speedily repressed.
In 49 the great Roman civil war broke out; Caesar instigated
Aristobulus against Antipater, who in common with the whole East
had espoused the cause of Pompey. But Aristobulus was poisoned by
the opposite party while yet in Italy, and about the same time his
son Alexander was also put to death at Antioch; thus the danger
to Antipater passed away. After the battle of Pharsalus he went
over to Caesar's side, and soon after rendered him an important
service by helping him out of his difficulties at Alexandria. By
this means he earned the good-will of Caesar towards the whole body
of the Jews and secured for himself (or Hyrcanus) a great extension
of power and of territory. The five "synedria" or "aristocracies"
of Gabinius were superseded, the most important conquest of the
Hasmonaeans restored, the walls of Jerusalem, which Pompey had razed,
rebuilt.
However indisputable the advantages conferred by the rule of
Antipater, the Jews could not forget that the Idumaean, in name
of Hyrcanus, the rightful heir of the Hasmonaeans, was in truth
setting up an authority of his own. The Sadducaean aristocracy
in particular, which formerly in the synedrium had shared the
supreme power with the high priest, endeavoured to restore
reality once more to the nominal ascendancy which still continued
to be attributed to the ethnarch and the synedrium. "When the
authorities (hoi 'en telei) of the Jews saw how the power of
Antipater and his sons was growing, their disposition towards him
became hostile" (Josephus, Antiquities, xiv. 9, 3). They were
specially jealous of the youthful Herod, to whom Galilee had been
entrusted by his father. On account of the arbitrary execution
of a robber chief Ezechias, who perhaps had originally been a
Hasmonaean partisan, they summoned him before the synedrium,
under the impression that it was not yet too late to remind him
that he was after all but a servant. But the defiant demeanour
of the culprit, and a threatening missive which at the same time
arrived from Sextus Caesar demanding his acquittal, rendered his
judges speechless, nor did they regain their courage until they
had heard the stinging reproaches of Sameas the scribe. Yet the
aged Hyrcanus, who did not comprehend the danger that was
threatening himself, postponed judgment upon Herod, and gave him
opportunity to withdraw. Having been appointed strategus of
Coelesyria by Sextus Caesar in the meanwhile he soon afterwards
appeared before Jerusalem at the head of an army, and the
authorities were compelled to address themselves in a conciliatory
manner to his father and to Phasael his brother in order to secure
his withdrawal.
The attempt to crush the serpent which had thus effected a lodgment
in the Hasmonaean house came too late. The result of it simply
was that the Herodians had now the advantage of being able to
distinguish between Hyrcanus and his "evil counsellors." From that
moment the downfall of the Sadducaean notables was certain. It was
of no avail to them that after the battle of Philippi (42) they
accused Herod and Phasael (Antipater having been murdered in 43)
before Antony of having been helpful in every possible way to
Cassius; Antony declared himself in the most decisive manner for
the two brothers. In their despair--for properly speaking they
were not national fanatics but only egoistic politicians--they
ultimately made common cause with Antigonus the son of
Aristobulus, and threw themselves into the arms of the Parthians,
perceiving the interests of the Romans and of Herod to be
inseparable (40). Fortune at first seemed to have declared in
favour of the pretender. The masses unanimously took his side;
Phasael committed suicide in prison; with a single blow Herod was
stripped of all his following and made a helpless fugitive. He
took refuge in Rome, however, where he was named king of Judaea
by the senate, and after a somewhat protracted war he finally,
with the help of the legions of Sosius, made himself master of
Jerusalem (37). The captive Antigonus was beheaded at Antioch.
King Herod began his reign by reorganising the synedrium; he
ordered the execution of forty-five of its noblest members, his
most zealous opponents. These were the Sadducaean notables who
long had headed the struggle against the Idumaean interlopers.
Having thus made away with the leaders of the Jerusalem
aristocracy, he directed his efforts to the business of corrupting
the rest. He appointed to the most important posts obscure
individuals, of priestly descent, from Babylon and Alexandria,
and thus replaced with creatures of his own the old aristocracy.
Nor did he rest content with this; in order to preclude the
possibility of any independent authority ever arising alongside
of his own, he abolished the life-tenure of the high-priestly
office, and brought it completely under the control of the secular
power. By this means he succeeded in relegating the Sadducees to
utter insignificance. They were driven out of their native
sphere--the political--into the region of theoretical and
ecclesiastical discussion, where they continued, but on quite
unequal terms, their old dispute with the Pharisees.
It was during the period of Herod's activity that the Pharisees,
strictly speaking, enjoyed their greatest prosperity (Sameas and
Abtalion, Hillel and Shammai); in the synedrium they became so
numerous as almost to equal the priests and elders. Quite
consistently with their principles they had abstained from
taking any part in the life and death struggle for the existence
of the national state. Their leaders had even counselled the
fanatical defenders of Jerusalem to open the gates to the enemy;
for this service they were treated with the highest honour by Herod.
He made it part of his general policy to favour the Pharisees
(as also the sect of the Essenes, insignificant though it was),
it being his purpose to restrict the national life again within
those purely ecclesiastical channels of activity which it had
abandoned since the Maccabaean wars. However reckless his conduct
in other respects, he was always scrupulously careful to avoid
wounding religious susceptibilities (Antiquities, xiv. 16, 3).
But although the Pharisees might be quite pleased that the
high-priesthood and the kingship were no longer united in one
and the same person, and that interest in the law again overshadowed
interest in politics, the populace for their part could never
forgive Herod for overthrowing the old dynasty. That he himself,
at least in religious profession, was a Jew did not improve his
position, but rather made it worse. It was not easy for him to
stifle the national feeling after it had once been revived among
the Jews; they could not forget the recent past, and objected to
being thrust back into the time when foreign domination was endured
by them as a matter of course. The Romans were regarded in quite
a different light from that in which the Persians and the Greeks
had been viewed, and Herod was only the client of the Romans.
His greatest danger seemed to arise from the still surviving
members of the Hasmonaean family, to whom, as is easily
understood, the national hopes clung. In the course of the earlier
years of his reign he removed every one of them from his path,
beginning with his youthful brother-in-law Aristobulus (35), after
whom came his old patron Hyrcanus II. (30), then Mariamne his wife
(29), and finally his stepmother Alexandra (28), the daughter of
Hyrcanus and the widow of Alexander Aristobuli. Subsequently,
in 25, he caused Costobarus and the sons of Babas to be executed.
While thus occupied with domestic affairs, Herod had constant
trouble also in his external relations, and each new phase in his
political position immediately made itself felt at home. In the
first instance he had much to suffer from Cleopatra, who would
willingly have seen Palestine reduced under Egyptian domination
once more, and who actually succeeded in inducing Antony to take
from Herod several fair and valuable provinces of his realm. Next,
his whole position was imperilled by the result of the battle of
Actium; he had once more ranged himself upon the wrong side. But
his tact did not fail him in winning Octavianus, as before it had
made Antony his friend. In fact he reaped nothing but advantage
from the great overturn which took place in Roman affairs; it
rid him of Cleopatra, a dangerous enemy, and gave him in the new
imperator a much better master than before.
During the following years he had leisure to carry out those
splendid works of peace by which it was his aim to ingratiate
himself with the emperor. He founded cities and harbours
(Antipatris, Caesarea), constructed roads, theatres, and temples,
and subsidised far beyond his frontier all works of public utility.
He taxed the Jews heavily, but in compensation promoted their
material interests with energy and discretion, and built for them,
from 20 or 19 B.C. onwards, the temple at Jerusalem. To gain their
sympathies he well knew to be impossible. Apart from the Roman
legions at his back his authority had its main support in his
fortresses and in his system of espionage.
But just as the acme of his splendour had been reached, he himself
became the instrument of a terrible vengeance for the crimes by
which his previous years had been stained; as executioner of all
the Hasmonaeans, he was now constrained to be the executioner of
his own children also. His suspicious temper had been aroused
against his now grown-up sons by Mariamne, whose claims through
their mother to the throne were superior to his own; his brother
Pheroras and his sister Salome made it their special business to
fan his jealousy into flame. To show the two somewhat arrogant
youths that the succession was not so absolutely secure in their
favour as they were supposing, the father summoned to his court
Antipater, the exiled son of a former marriage. Antipater, under
the mask of friendship, immediately began to carry on infamous
intrigues against his half brothers, in which Pheroras and Salome
unconsciously played into his hands. For years he persevered
alike in favouring and unfavouring circumstances with his part,
until at last, by the machinations of a Lacedemonian, Eurycles,
who had been bribed, Herod was induced to condemn the sons of
Mariamne at Berytus, and cause them to be strangled (Samaria, 7-6
B.C.). Not long afterwards a difference between Antipater and
Salome led to the exposure of the former. Herod was compelled
to drain the cup to the dregs; he was not spared the knowledge
that he had murdered his children without a cause. His remorse
threw him into a serious illness, in which his strong constitution
wrestled long with death. While he lay at Jericho near his end
he gave orders for the execution of Antipater also; and to embitter
the joy of the Jews at his removal he caused their elders to be
shut up together in the hippodrome at Jericho with the injunction
to butcher them as soon as he breathed his last, that so there
might be sorrow throughout the land. The latter order, however,
was not carried out.
His death (4 B.C.) gave the signal for an insurrection of small
beginnings which gradually spread until it ultimately infected
all the people; it was repressed by Varus with great cruelty.
Meanwhile Herod's connexions were at Rome disputing about the
inheritance. The deceased king (who was survived by several
children of various marriages) had made a will, which was
substantially confirmed by Augustus. By it his son Philip
received the northern portion of the territory on the east
of the Jordan along with the district of Paneas (Caesarea
Philippi); his thirty-seven years' reign over this region was
happy. Another son, Herod Antipas, obtained Galilee and Peraea;
he beautified his domains with architectural works (Sepphoris,
Tiberias; Livias, Machaerus), and succeeded by his fox-like
policy in ingratiating himself with the emperors, particularly
with Tiberius, for that very cause, however, becoming odious to
the Roman provincial officials. The principal heir was Archelaus,
to whom Idumaea, Judaea, and Samaritis were allotted; Augustus at
first refused him the title of king. Archelaus had experienced
the greatest difficulty in carrying through his claims before
the emperor in face of the manifold oppositions of his enemies;
the vengeance which he wreaked upon his subjects was so severe
that in 6 A,D. a Jewish and Samaritan embassy besought the emperor
for his deposition. Augustus assented, banishing Archelaus to
Vienne, and putting in his place a Roman procurator. Thenceforward
Judaea continued under procurators, with the exception of a brief
interval (41-44 A.D.), during which Herod Agrippa I. united under
his sway all the dominions of his grandfather. /1/
****************************************
1. Agrippa was the grandson of Mariamne through Aristobulus.
Caligula, whose friendship he had secured in Rome, bestowed upon
him in 37 the dominions of Philip with the title of king, and
afterwards the tetrarchy of Antipas, whom he deposed and banished
to Lugdunum (39). Claudius added the possessions of Archelaus.
But the kingdom was again taken away from his son Agrippa II.
(44), who, however, after the death of his uncle, Herod of Chalcis,
obtained that principality for which at a later period (52) the
tetrarchy of Philip was substituted. His sister Berenice is known
as the mistress of Titus; another sister, Drusilla, was the wife
of the procurator Felix. The descendants of Mariamne through
Alexander held for some time an Armenian principality.
****************************************
The termination of the vassal kingship resulted in manifest
advantage to the Sadducees. The high priest and synedrium again
acquired political importance; they were the responsible
representatives of the nation in presence of the suzerain power,
and conceived themselves to be in some sort lords of land and
people (John xi. 48). For the Pharisees the new state of affairs
appears to have been less satisfactory. That the Romans were
much less oppressive to the Jews than the rulers of the house of
Herod was a consideration of less importance to them than the
fact that the heathen first unintentionally and then deliberately
were guilty of the rudest outrages upon the law, outrages against
which those sly half-Jews had well understood how to be on their
guard. It was among the lower ranks of the people, however, that
hatred to the Romans had its proper seat. On the basis of the views
and tendencies which had long prevailed there, a new party was now
formed, that of the Zealots, which did not, like the Pharisees, aim
merely at the fulfilment of all righteousness, i.e., of the law,
and leave everything else in the hands of God, but was determined
to take an active part in bringing about the realisation of the
kingdom of God (Josephus, Antiquities, xviii. 1, 1).
As the transition to the new order of things was going on, the
census of Quirinius took place (6-7 A.D.); it occasioned an
immense excitement, which, however, was successfully allayed.
On the withdrawal of Quirinius, Coponius remained behind as
procurator of Judaea; he was followed, under Augustus, by Marcus
Ambivius and Annius Rufus; under Tiberius, by Valerius Gratus
(15-26 A.D.) and Pontius Pilatus (26-36 A.D.); under Caligula,
by Marcellus (36-37) and Marullus (37-41 A.D.). The procurators
were subordinate to the imperial legati of Syria; they resided
in Caesarea, and visited Jerusalem on special occasions only.
They had command of the military, and their chief business was
the maintenance of the peace and the care of the revenue. They
interested themselves in affairs of religion only in so far as
these had a political side; the temple citadel Antonia was constantly
garrisoned with a cohort. The administration of justice appears
to have been left to a very considerable extent in the hands of
the synedrium, but it was not allowed to give effect to any capital
sentence. At the head of the native authorities stood at this time
not so much the actual high priest as the college of the chief priests.
The actual office of high priest had lost its political importance
in consequence of the frequency with which its holders were changed;
thus, for example, Annas had more influence than Caiaphas.
The principle of interfering as little as possible with the
religious liberty of the Jews was rudely assailed by the Emperor
Caius, who like a second Antiochus, after various minor vexations,
gave orders that his image should be set up in the temple of
Jerusalem as in others elsewhere. It was entirely through the
courage and tact of the Syrian governor P. Petronius that the
execution of these orders was temporarily postponed until the
emperor was induced by Agrippa I. to withdraw them. Caius soon
afterwards died, and under the rule of Agrippa I., to whom the
government of the entire kingdom of his grandfather was committed
by Claudius, the Jews enjoyed much prosperity; in every respect
the king was all they could wish. This very prosperity seems,
however, to have caused them fresh danger. For it made them feel
the government by procurators, which was resumed after the death
of Agrippa I., to be particularly hard to bear, whatever the
individual characters of these might be. They were Cuspius Fadus
(from 44, under whom Theudas), Tiberius Alexander (the Romanised
nephew of Philo, till 48), Cumanus (48-52, under whom the volcano
already began to give dangerous signs of activity), and Felix
(52-60). Felix, who has the honour to be pilloried in the pages of
Tacitus, contrived to make the dispeace permanent. The influence
of the two older parties, both of which were equally interested in
the maintenance of the existing order, and in that interest were
being drawn nearer to each other, diminished day by day. The
masses broke loose completely from the authority of the scribes;
the ruling nobility adapted itself better to the times; under the
circumstances which then prevailed, it is not surprising that
they became thoroughly secular and did not shrink from the
employment of directly immoral means for the attainment of their
ends. The Zealots became the dominant party. It was a combination
of noble and base elements; superstitious enthusiasts (Acts xxi.
38) and political assassins, the so-called sicarii, were conjoined
with honest but fanatical patriots. Felix favoured the sicarii in
order that he might utilise them; against the others his hostility
raged with indiscriminating cruelty, yet without being able to
check them. The anarchy which he left behind him as a legacy was
beyond the control of his able successor Porcius Festus (60-62),
and the last two procurators, Albinus (62-64) and Gessius Florus,
acted as if it had been their special business to encourage and
promote it. All the bonds of social order were dissolved; no
property was secure; the assassins alone prospered, and the
procurators went shares with them in the profits.
It was inevitable that deep resentment against the Romans should
be felt in every honest heart. At last it found expression.
During his visit to Jerusalem in May 66 Florus laid hands upon the
temple treasure; the Jews allowed themselves to go so far as to
make a joke about it, which he avenged by giving over a portion of
the city to be plundered, and crucifying a number of the
inhabitants. He next insisted upon their kissing the rod, ordering
that a body of troops which was approaching should be met and
welcomed. At the persuasion of their leaders the Jews forced
themselves even to this; but a constant succession of fresh
insults and cruelties followed, till patience was quite exhausted
at last, and in a violent street fight the Romans were so handled
that the procurator withdrew from the town, leaving only the
cohort in Antonia. Once again was an attempt at pacification made
by Agrippa II., who hastened from Alexandria with this purpose,
but the Jews could not bring themselves to make submission to
Gessius Florus. It so happened that at this juncture the fortress
of Masada on the Dead Sea fell into the hands of the Zealots; the
courage of the party of action rose, and at the instance of the
hot-headed Eleazar the son of Ananias, a man, still young, of
highest priestly family, the sacrifice on behalf of the emperor
was discontinued, ie., revolt was declared. But the native
authorities continued opposed to a war. At their request King
Agrippa sent soldiers to Jerusalem; at first they appeared to
have some effect, but ultimately they were glad to make their
escape in safety from the city. The cohort in Antonia was in like
manner unable to hold its own; freedom was given it to withdraw;
but, contrary to the terms of capitulation, it was put to the
sword. The war party now signalised its triumph over all elements
of opposition from within by the murder of the high priest
Ananias.
A triumph was gained also over the outer foe. The Syrian legate,
Cestius Gallus, appeared before Jerusalem in the autumn of 66, but
after a short period raised the siege; his deliberate withdrawal
was changed into a precipitate flight in an attack made by the
Jews at Bethhoron. The revolt now spread irresistibly through
all ranks and classes of the population, and the aristocracy found
it expedient itself to assume the leadership. An autonomous
government was organised, with the noblest members of the community
at its head; of these the most important was the high priest
Ananus.
Meanwhile Nero entrusted the conduct of the Jewish war to Vespasian,
his best general. In the spring of 67 he began his task in
Galilee, where the historian Josephus had command of the
insurgents. The Jews entirely distrusted him and he them; in a
short time the Romans were masters of Galilee, only a few strong
places holding out against them. Josephus was besieged in
Jotapata, and taken prisoner; the other places also were unable to
hold out long. Such of the champions of freedom in Galilee as
escaped betook themselves to Jerusalem; amongst these was the
Zealot leader John of Giscala. There they told the story of their
misfortunes, of which they laid the blame upon Josephus, and upon
the aristocratic government as having no heart for the common cause
and having treachery for their motto. The Zealots now openly aimed
at the overthrow of the existing government, but Ananus bravely
withstood them, and pressed so hard on them that they summoned
the Idumaeans into the city to their aid. These honourable fanatics
indeed withdrew again as soon as they had discovered that they were
being used for sinister designs; but in the meanwhile they had
accomplished the work of the Zealots. The old magistracy of
Jerusalem was destroyed, Ananus with the heads of the aristocracy
and very many other respectable citizens put to death. The radicals,
for the most part not natives of the city, came into power; John
of Giscala at their head tyrannized over the inhabitants.
While these events were taking place in Jerusalem, Vespasian had
subdued the whole country, with the exception of one or two
fortresses. But as he was setting about the siege of the capital,
tidings arrived of the death of Nero, and the offensive was
discontinued. For almost two years (June 68 to April 70), with
a short break, war was suspended. When Vespasian at the end of
this period became emperor, he entrusted to Titus the task of
reducing Jerusalem. There in the interval the internal struggle
had been going on, even after the radicals had gained the mastery.
As a counterpoise to John of Giscala the citizens had received
the guerilla captain Simon bar Giora into the city; the two were
now at feud with each other, but were alike in their rapacity
towards the citizens. John occupied the temple, Simon the upper
city Iying over against it on the west. For a short time a third
entered into competition with the two rivals, a certain Eleazar
who had separated from John and established himself in the inner
temple. But just as Titus was beginning the siege (Easter, 70)
John contrived to get rid of this interloper.
Titus attacked from the north. After the lower city had fallen
into his hands, he raised banks with a view to the storm of the
temple and the upper city. But the defenders, who were now united
in a common cause, taught him by their vigorous resistance that
his object was not to be so quickly gained. He therefore
determined to reduce them by famine, and for this end completely
surrounded the city with a strong wall. In the beginning of July
he renewed the attack, which he directed in the first instance
against the temple. The tower of Antonia fell on the 5th, but the
temple continued to beheld notwithstanding; until the I7th the
daily sacrifice continued to be offered. The Romans succeeded in
gaining the outer court in August only. To drive them out, the
Jews in the night of August 10-11 made a sortie, but were
compelled to retire, the enemy forcing their way behind them into
the inner court. A legionary flung a firebrand into an annexe of
the temple, and soon the whole structure was in flames. A terrible
slaughter of the defenders ensued, but John with a determined band
succeeded in cutting his way out, and by means of the bridge over
the Tyropceon valley made his escape into the upper city.
No attack had as yet been directed against this quarter; but
famine was working terrible ravages among the crowded population.
Those in command, however, refused to capitulate unless freedom to
withdraw along with their wives and children were granted. These
terms being withheld, a storm, after the usual preparations on the
part of the Romans, took place. The resistance was feeble; the
strong towers were hardly defended at all; Simon bar Giora and
John of Giscala now thought only of their personal safety. In the
unprotected city the Roman soldiers spread fire and slaughter
unchecked (September 7, 70).
Of those who survived also some were put to death; the rest were
sold or carried off to the mines and amphitheatres. The city was
levelled with the ground; the tenth legion was left behind in
charge. Titus took with him to Rome for his triumphal procession
Simon bar Giora and John of Giscala, along with seven hundred other
prisoners, also the sacred booty taken from the temple, the
candlestick, the golden table, and a copy of the Torah. He was
slightly premature with his triumph; for some time elapsed, and
more than one bloody battle was necessary before the rebellion
was completely stifled. It did not come wholly to an end until
the fall of Masada (April 73).
I5. THE RABBINS.
Even now Palestine continued for a while to be the centre of Jewish
life, but only in order to prepare the way for its transition
into thoroughly cosmopolitan forms. The development of thought
sustained no break on account of the sad events which had taken
place, but was only directed once more in a consistent manner
towards these objects which had been set before it from the time of
the Babylonian exile. On the ruins of the city and of the temple
the Pharisaic Judaism which rests upon the law and the school
celebrated its triumph. National fanaticism indeed was not yet
extinguished, but it burnt itself completely out in the vigorous
insurrection led by Simeon bar Koziba (Bar Cochebas, 132-135).
That a conspicuous rabbin, Akiba, should have taken part in it,
and have recognised in Simeon the Messiah, was an inconsistency
on his part which redounds to his honour.
Inasmuch as the power of the rabbins did not depend upon the
political or hierarchical forms of the old commonwealth, it
survived the fall of the latter. Out of what hitherto had been a
purely moral influence something of an official position now
grew. They formed themselves into a college which regarded
itself as a continuation of the old synedrium, and which carried
forward its name. At first its seat was at Jamnia, but it soon
removed to Galilee, and remained longest at Tiberias. The
presidency was hereditary in the family of Hillel, with the last
descendants of whom the court itself came to an end. /1/
***************************************
1. The following is the genealogy of the first Nasi:--Gamaliel ben
Simeon (Josephus, Vita, 38) ben Gamaliel (Acts v. 34, xxii. 3) ben
simeon ben Hillel. The name Gamaliel was that which occurred most
frequently among the patriarchs; see Codex Theod. xvi. 8, 22.
***************************************
The respect in which the synedrial president was held rapidly
increased; like Christian patriarchs under Mahometan rule, he was
also recognised by the imperial government as the municipal head
of the Jews of Palestine, and bore the secular title of the old
high priests (nasi, ethnarch, patriarch). Under him the Palestinian
Jews continued to form a kind of state within a state until the 5th
century. From the non-Palestinian Jews he received offerings of
money. (Compare Gothofredus on Codex Theod., xvi. 8, "De Judaeis;"
and Morinus, Exer. Bibl., ii. exerc. 3, 4).
The task of the rabbins was so to reorganise Judaism under the new
circumstances that it could continue to assert its distinctive
character. What of external consistency had been lost through the
extinction of the ancient commonwealth required to be compensated
for by an inner centralisation proportionately stronger. The
separation from everything heathenish became more pronounced than
before; the use of the Greek language was of necessity still
permitted, but at least the Septuagint was set aside by Aquila
(Cod. Justinian., Nov. 146) inasmuch as it had now become the
Christian Bible. For to this period also belongs the definitive
separation between the synagogue and the church; henceforward
Christianity could no longer figure as a Jewish sect.
Intensified exclusiveness was accompanied by increased internal
stringency. What at an earlier period had still remained to some
extent fluid now became rigidly fixed; for example, an authentic
text of the canon was now established, and at the same time the
distinction between canon and apocrypha sharply drawn. The old
tendency of the scribes to leave as little as possible free to the
individual conscience, but to bring everything within the scope of
positive ordinance, now celebrated its greatest triumphs. It was
only an apparent movement in the direction of liberty, if
regulations which had become quite impossible were now modified or
cancelled. The most influential of the rabbins were indeed the
least solicitous about the maintenance of what was old, and had no
hesitation in introducing numerous and thoroughgoing innovations;
but the conservatives R. Eliezer ben Hyrcanus and R. Ishmael ben
Elisha were in truth more liberal-minded than the leaders of the
party of progress, notably than R. Akiba. Even the Ultramontanes
have never hesitated at departures from the usage of the ancient
and mediaeval church; and the Pharisaic rabbins were guided in
their innovations by liberal principles no more than they.
The object of the new determinations was simply to widen the
domain of the law in a consistent manner, to bring the individual
entirely under the iron rule of system. But the Jewish
communities gave willing obedience to the hierarchy of the
rabbins; Judaism had to be maintained, cost what it might. That
the means employed were well adapted to the purpose of maintaining
the Jews as a firmly compacted religious community even after all
bonds of nationality had fallen away cannot be doubted. But
whether the attainment of this purpose by incredible exertion was
a real blessing to themselves and the world may very well be
disputed.
One consequence of the process of intellectual isolation and of the
effort to shape everything in accordance with hard and fast rules
and doctrines was the systematisation and codification of juristic
and ritual tradition, a work with which a beginning was made in the
century following the destruction of Jerusalem. Towards the end
of the 2nd century the Pharisaic doctrine of Hillel as it had been
further matured by Akiba was codified and elevated to the position
of statute law by the patriarch Rabban Judah the Holy (Mishna). /1/
*************************************
1. The Mishna succeeded almost, but not quite, in completely doing
away with all conflicting tendencies. At first the heterodox
tradition of that time was also committed to writing (R. Ishmael
ben Elisha) and so handed down,--in various forms (col]ection of
the Baraithas, that is, of old precepts which had not been received
into the Mishna, in the Tosephtha). Nor did the active opposition
altogether die out even at a later period; under favouring
circumstances it awoke to new life in Karaism, the founder of which,
Anan ben David, lived in Babylonia in the middle of the 8th century.
************************************
But this was only the first stage in the process of systematising
and fixing tradition. The Mishna became itself the object of
rabbinical comment and supplement; the Tannaim, whose work was
registered in the Mathnetha (Mishna, DEUTERWSIS = doctrine), were
followed by the Amoraim, whose work in turn took permanent shape
in the Gemara (= doctrine). The Palestinian Gemara was reduced
to writing in perhaps the 4th or 5th century; unfortunately it
has been preserved to us only in part, but appears to have reached
the Middle Ages in a perfect state (compare Schiller-Szinessy in
the Academy, 1878, p. 170 seq.). Even thus the process which
issued in the production of the Talmud was not yet completed;
the Babylonian Amoraim carried it forward for some time longer,
until at last at the rise of Islam the Babylonian Gemara was
also written down.
In the sth century Palestine ceased to be the centre of Judaism.
Several circumstances conspired to bring this about. The position
of the Jews in the Roman Empire had changed for the worse with the
elevation of Christianity to be the religion of the state; the
large autonomy which until then they had enjoyed in Palestine
was now restricted; above all, the family of the Patriarchs,
which had come to form a veritable dynasty, became extinct. /1/
****************************************
1. Compare Gothofredus on Cod. Theod., xvi. 8, 29, ad voc. "post
excessum patriarcharum."
****************************************
But this did not make an end of what may be called the Jewish
church-state; henceforward it had its home in Babylonia. From the
period of the exile, a numerous and coherent body of Jews had
continued to subsist there; the Parthians and Sassanidae granted
them self-government; at their head was a native prince (Resh
Galutha,--can be clearly traced from 2nd century A.D. onwards)
who, when the Palestinian patriarchate came to an end, was left
without a rival. This remarkable relic of a Jewish commonwealth
continued to exist until the time of the Abassides. /2/
************************************
2. See Noeldeke, Tabari; 68, 118, and Kremer, Culturgeschichte des
Orients unter den Chalifen, i. 188, ii. 176.
************************************
Even as early as the beginning of the 3rd century A.D. certain
rabbins, at their head Abba Areka (Rab), had migrated from Palestine
and founded a settlement for learning in the law in Babylonia.
The schools there (at Pumbeditha, Sora, Nahardea) prospered greatly,
vied with those of Palestine, and continued to exist after the
cessation of the latter, when the patriarchate became extinct; thus
they had the last word in the settlement of doctrine.
Alongside of the settlement of tradition went another task, that
of fixing the letters of the consonantal text of the Bible (by the
Massora), its vowel pronunciation (by the punctuation), and its
translation into the Aramaic vernacular (Targum). Here also the
Babylonians came after the Palestinians, yet of this sort of
erudition Palestine continued to be the headquarters even after the
5th century.
With this task--that of attaining to the greatest possible
conformity to the letter and of continuing therein--the inner
development of Jewish thought came to an end. /1/
***************************************
1. Compare F. Weber, System der altsynagagalen palaestinischen
Theologie, Leipsic, 1880.
****************************************
The later Hebrew literature, which does not fall to be considered
here, contributed very few new elements; in so far as an intellectual
life existed at all among the Jews of the Middle Ages, it was not
a growth of native soil but proceeded from the Mahometan or Latin
culture of individuals. The Kabbala at most, and even it hardly
with justice, can be regarded as having been a genuine product of
Judaism. It originated in Palestine, and subsequently flourished
chiefly in the later Middle Ages in Spain, and, like all other
methodised nonsense, had strong attractions for Christian scholars.
16. THE JEWISH DISPERSION.
Something still remains to be said with reference to the diaspora.
We have seen how it began; in spite of Josephus (Antiquities,
xi. 5, 2), it is to be carried back not to the Assyrian but merely
to the Babylonian captivity; it was not composed of Israelites,
but solely of citizens of the southern kingdom. It received its
greatest impulse from Alexander, and then afterwards from Caesar.
In the Graeco-Roman period Jerusalem at the time of the great
festival presented the appearance of a veritable Babel (Acts ii.
9-11); with the Jews themselves were mingled the proselytes (Acts
ii. 11), for even already that religion was gaining considerable
conquests among the heathen; as King Agrippa I. writes to the
Emperor Caius (Philo, Legat. ad Gaium, sec. 36),
"Jerusalem is the metropolis not only of Judaea but of very many
lands, on account of the colonies which on various occasions
('epi xairwn) it has sent out into the adjoining countries of Egypt,
Phoenicia, Syria, and Coelesyria, and into the more remote Pamphylia,
Cilicia, the greater part of Asia Minor as far as to Bithynia and
the remotest parts of Pontus; likewise into Europe--Thessaly,
Boeotia, Macedonia, AEtolia, Attica, Argos, Corinth, most parts
(and these the fairest) of the Peloponnesus. Nor are the Jewish
settlements confined to the mainland only; they are found also in
the more important islands, Euboea, Cyprus, Crete. I do not insist
on the countries beyond the Euphrates, for with few exceptions all
of them, Babylon and the fertile regions around it, have Jewish
inhabitants."
In the west of Europe also they were not wanting; many thousands
of them lived in Rome. In those cities where they were at all
numerous they, during the imperial period, formed separate
communities; Josephus has preserved a great variety of documents
in which the Roman authorities recognise their rights and liberties
(especially as regards the Sabbath rest and the observance of
festivals). Of greatest importance was the community in Alexandria;
according to Philo a million of Jews had their residence there under
an ethnarch for whom a gerusia was afterwards substituted by Augustus
(In Flac., secs. 6, 10). The extent to which this diaspora was
helpful in the diffusion of Christianity, the manner in which the
mission of the apostles everywhere attached itself to the synagogues
and proseuchai, is well known from the New Testament. That the
Christians of the 1st cenentury had much to suffer along with the Jews
is also a familiar fact. For at this period, in other respects
more favourable to them than any other had previously been, the
Jews had occasionally to endure persecution. The emperors, taking
umbrage at their intrusiveness, more than once banished them from
Rome (Acts xviii. 2). The good will of the native population they
never secured; they were most hated in Egypt and Syria, where they
were strongest. /1/
**********************************
1. Compare Schuerer, Neutest. Zeitgeschichte (1874), sec. 31.
The place taken by the Jewish element in the world of that time
is brilliantly set forth by Mommsen in his History of Rome (book
v. chapter ii.; English translation iv. p. 538 seq., 1866):--
"How numerous even in Rome the Jewish population was already before
Caesar's time, and how closely at the same time the Jews even then
kept together as fellow-countrymen, is shown by the remark of an
author of this period, that it was dangerous for a governor to offend
the Jews in his province, because he might then certainly reckon on
being hissed after his return, by the populace of the capital.
Even at this time the predominant business of the Jews was trade....
At this period too we encounter the peculiar antipathy of the
Occidentals touards this so thoroughly Oriental race and their
foreign opinions and customs. This Judaism, although not the most
pleasing feature in the nowhere pleasing picture of the mixture of
nations which then prevailed, was, nevertheless, an historical
element developing itself in the natural course of things,...
which Caesar just like his predecessor Alexander fostered as far
as possible....They did not, of course, contemplate placing the
Jewish nationality on an equal footing with the Hellenic or
Italo-Hellenic. But the Jew who has not, like the Occidental,
received the Pandora's gift of political organisation, and stands
substantially in a relation of indifference to the state, who,
moreover, is as reluctant to give up the essence of his national
idiosyncrasy as he is ready to clothe it with any nationality at
pleasure and to adapt himself up to a certain degree to foreign
habits--the Jew was, for this very reason, as it were, made for
a state which was to be built on the ruins of a hundred living
polities, and to be endowed with a somewhat abstract and, from
the outset, weakened nationality. In the ancient world also Judaism
was an effective leaven of cosmopolitanism and of national
decomposition."
*********************************************
The position of the Jews in the Roman Empire was naturally not
improved by the great risings under Nero, Trajan (in Cyrene,
Cyprus, Mesopotamia), and Hadrian. The East strictly so called,
became more and more their proper home. The Christianization of
the empire helped still further in a very special way to detach
them from the Western world. /1/
***********************************
1. For a brief time only were they again favoured by Julian the
Apostate; compare Gibbon, chapter xxiii.
***********************************
They sided with the Persians against the Byzantines; in the year
614 they were even put in possession of Jerusalem by Chosroes,
but were not long able to hold their own against Heraclius. /2/
*************************************
2. Gibbon, chapter xlvi.
*************************************
With Islam also they found themselves in greater sympathy than with
Christianity, although they were cruelly treated by Mahomet in Arabia,
and driven by Omar out of the Hejaz, and notwithstanding the facts
that they were as matter of course excluded from citizenship, and
that they were held by Moslems as a whole in greater contempt than
the Christians. They throve especially well on what may be called
the bridge between East and West, in Mauretania and Spain, where they
were the intellectual intermediaries between the Arab and the Latin
culture. In the Sephardim and Ashkenazim the distinction between the
subtler Oriental and the more conservative Western Jews has maintained
itself in Europe also. From the 8th century onwards Judaism put
forth a remarkable side shoot in the Khazars on the Volga; if
legend Is to he believed, but little was required at one time to
have induced the Russians to accept the Jewish rather than the
Christian faith.
In the West the equal civil rights which Caracalla had conferred on
all free inhabitants of the empire came to an end, so far as the
Jews were concerned, in the time of Constantine. The state then
became the secular arm of the church, and took action, though with
less severity, against Jews just as against heretics and pagans.
As early as the year 315, Constantine made conversion from
Christianity to Judaism a penal offence, and prohibited Jews, on
pain of death, from circumcising their Christian slaves. These
laws were re-enacted and made more severe by Constantius, who
attached the penalty of death to marriages between Jews and
Christians. Theodosius I. and Honorius, indeed, by strictly
prohibiting the destruction of synagogues, and by maintaining the
old regulation that a Jew was not to be summoned before a court of
justice on a Sabbath-day, put a check upon the militant zeal of the
Church, by which even Chrysostom, for example, allowed himself to
be carried away at Antioch. But Honorius rendered them ineligible
for civil or military service, leaving open to them only the bar
and the decurionate, the latter being a _privilegiium odiosum_.
Their liberty to try cases by their own law was curtailed; the cases
between Jews and Christians were to be tried by Christian judges
only. Theodosius II. prohibited them from building new synagogues,
and anew enforced their disability for all state employments. Most
hostile of all was the orthodox Justinian, who, however, was still
more severe against Pagans and Samaritans. /1/
******************************************
1. Cod. Theod., xvi. 8: "De Judaeis, Coelicolis, et Samaritanis;"
Cod. Just., i. 9: "De Judaeis et Coelicolis." With regard to
these coelicolae, see Gothofredus on Cod. Theod., xvi. 8, 9, and
also J. Bernays, "Ueber die Gottesfuerchtigen bei Juvenal," in
the Comm. Philol in hon. Th. Mommsen, 1877, p. 163.
******************************************
He harassed the Jews with a law enjoining them to observe Easter on
the same day as the Christians, a law which it was of course found
impossible to carry out. /2/
*******************************************
2. Gibbon, chapter xlvii.
*******************************************
In the Germanic states which arose upon the ruins of the Roman
empire, the Jews did not fare badly on the whole. It was only
in cases where the state was dominated by the Catholic Church, as,
for example; among the Spanish Visigoths, that they were cruelly
oppressed; among the Arian Ostrogoths, on the other hand, they
had nothing to complain of. One thing in their favour was the
Germanic principle that the law to be applied depended not on the
land but on the nationality, as now in the East Europeans are
judged by the consuls according to the law of their respective
nations. The autonomy of the Jewish communities, which had been
curtailed by the later emperors, was now enlarged once more under
the laxer political and legal conditions. The Jews fared
remarkably well under the Frankish monarchy; the Carolingians helped
them in every possible way, making no account of the complaints of
the bishops. They were allowed to hold property in land, but
showed no eagerness for it; leaving agriculture to the Germans, they
devoted them selves to trade. The market was completely in their
hands; as a specially lucrative branch of commerce they still
carried on the traffic in slaves, which had engaged them even in
ancient times. /1/
***************************************
1. Agobardus Lugdunensis, Die Insolentia Judaeorum, De Judaicis
superstitionibus. Agobard was no superstitious fanatic, but one
of the weightiest and most enlightened ecclesiastics of the Middle
Ages.
***************************************
Meanwhile the Church was not remiss in seeking constantly repeated
re-enactments of the old imperial laws, in the framing of which she
had had paramount influence, and which she now incorporated with
her own canon law. /2/
***************************************
2. Compare Decret. i., dist. 45, c. 3; Decr. ii., caus. 23,
qaest. 8, c. 9, caus. 28, qu. 1, c. 10-12; Decr. iii., de
consecr., dist. 4, c. 93; Decretal. Greg. 5, 6 ("De Judaeis,
Sarracenis, et eorum servis"), 5, 19, 18; Extrav. commun 5, 2.
***************************************
Gradually she succeeded in attaining her object. In the later Middle
Ages the position of the Jews in the Christian society deteriorated.
Intercourse with them was shunned; their isolation from being
voluntary became compulsory; from the I3th century onwards they were
obliged to wear, as a distinctive mark (more necessary in the East
than in the West), a round or square yellow badge on their breast. /3/
*****************************************
3. Compare Du Cange, s. v. "Judaei;" also Reuter, Gesch. d.
Aufklaerung im Mittelalter, i. 154 seq. In spite of all the legal
restrictions laid upon them, the Jews still continued to have great
influence with the princes, and more especially with the popes, of
the Middle Ages.
*****************************************
The difference of religion elicited a well-marked religious hate with
oft-repeated deadly outbreaks, especially during the period of the
crusades, and afterwards when the Black Death was raging (1348-50).
Practical consequences like these the Church of course did not
countenance; the popes set themselves against persecutions of
the Jews, /4/
*****************************************
4. Decr. ii. 23, 8, 9. Alexander II. omnibus episeopis Hispaniae:
Dispar...est Judaeorum et Sarracenorum eausa; in illos enim, qui
Christianos persequuntur et ex urbibus et propriis sedibus pellunt,
juste pugnatur, hi vero ubique servire parati sunt.
********************************************
but with imperfect success. The popular aversion rested by no means
exclusively on religious considerations; worldly motives were also
present. The Jews of that period had in a still higher degree
than now the control of financial affairs in their hands; and they
used it without scruple. The Church herself had unintentionally
given them a monopoly of the money market, by forbidding
Christians to take interest. /5/
********************************************
5. Decretal. Greg. v. 19, 18. Innocent III. in name of the
Lateran Council: Quanto amplius Christiana religio ab exactione
compescitur usurarum, tanto gravisu super his Judaeorum perfidia
insolescit, ita quod brevi tempore Christianorum exhauriunt
facultates. Volentes igitur in hac parse prospicere Christianis,
ne a Judaeis immaniter aggraventur, synodali decreto statuimus, ut,
si de caetero quocunque praetextu Judaaei a Christianis graves
immoderatasve usuras extorserint, Christianorum eis participium
subtrahatur, donec de immoderato gravamine satisfecerint competenter....
Principibus autem injungimus, ut propter hoc non sint Christianis
infesti, sed potius a tanto gravamine studeant cohibere Judaeos.
******************************************
In this way the Jews became rich indeed, but at the same time made
themselves still more repugnant to the Christian population than
they previously were by reason of their religion.
Having, according to the later mediaeval system, no rights in the
Christian state, the Jews were tolerated only in those territories
where the sovereign in the exercise of free favour accorded them
protection. This protection was granted them in many quarters,
but never for nothing; numerous and various taxes, which could be
raised or changed in a perfectly arbitrary way, were exacted in
exchange. But in countries where the feeling of nationality
attained to a vigorous development, the spirit of toleration was
speedily exhausted; the Jews were expelled by the act of the
state. England was the first kingdom in which this occurred
(1290); France followed in 1395, Spain and Portugal in 1492 and
1495. In this way it came about that the Holy Roman Empire--
Germany, Italy, and adjoining districts--became the chief abode of
the Jews. /1/ In the anarchy which here prevailed they could best
*****************************************
1. The Polish Jews are German Jews who migrated in the Middle Ages
to Poland, but have maintained to the present day their German
speech, a mediaeval South-Frankish dialect, of course greatly
corrupted. In Russian "German" and "Jew" mean the same thing.
******************************************
maintain their separate attitude, and if they were expelled from
one locality they readily found refuge in some other. The
emperor had indeed the right of extirpating them altogether (with
the exception of a small number to be left as a memorial); but,
in the first place, he had in various ways given up this right to
the states of the empire, and, moreover, his pecuniary resources
were so small that he could not afford to want the tax which the
Jews as his "servi camerae" paid him for protecting their persons
and property. In spite of many savage persecutions the Jews
maintained their ground, especially in those parts of Germany
where the political confusion was greatest. They even succeeded
in maintaining a kind of autonomy by means of an arrangement in
virtue of which civil processes which they had against each other
were decided by their own rabbins in accordance with the law of
the Talmud. /2/
**********************************************
2. Stobbe, Die Juden in Deutschl. waehr. d. Mittelalt.,
Brunsw., 1866.
**********************************************
The Jews, through their having on the one hand separated theselves,
and on the other hand been excluded on religious grounds
from the Gentiles, gained an internal solidarity and solidity
which has hitherto enabled them to survive all the attacks of time.
The hostility of the Middle Ages involved them in no danger; the
greatest peril has been brought upon them by modern times, along
with permission and increasing inducements to abandon their
separate position. It is worth while to recall on this point the
opinion of Spinoza, who was well able to form a competent judgment
(Tract. Theol. polit., c. 4, ad fin.):--
"That the Jews have maintained themselves so long in spite of their
dispersed and disorganised condition is not at all to be wondered at,
when it is considered how they separated themselves from all other
nationalities in such a way as to bring upon themselves the hatred
of all, and that not only by external rites contrary to those of
other nations, but also by the sign of circumcision, which they
maintain most religiously. Experience shows that their
conservation is due in a great degree to the very hatred which
they have incurred. When the king of Spain compelled the Jews
either to accept the national religion or to go into banishment,
very many of them accepted the Roman Catholic faith, and in
virtue of this received all the privileges of Spanish subjects, and
were declared eligible for every honour; the consequence was that
a process of absorption began immediately, and in a short time
neither trace nor memory of them survived. Quite different was
the history of those whom the king of Portugal compelled to accept
the creed of his nation; although converted, they continued to
live apart from the rest of their fellow-subjects, having been
declared unfit for any dignity. So great importance do I attach
to the sign of circumcision also in this connection, that I am
persuaded that it is sufficient by itself to maintain the separate
existence of the nation for ever."
The persistency of the race may of course prove a harder thing to
overcome than Spinoza has supposed; but nevertheless he will be
found to have spoken truly in declaring that the so-called
emancipation of the Jews must inevitably lead to the extinction
of Judaism wherever the process is extended beyond the political
to the social sphere. For the accomplishment of this centuries
may be required.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Prolegomena to the History of Israel
by Julius Wellhausen
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