Prolegomena to the History of Israel Part 26

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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.sociations, ***********************************************

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 dest.i.tute 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, x.x.xiv. 14, comp.

supra), for where the G.o.ds 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 princ.i.p.al 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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-G.o.d (x.x.xv. 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 a.s.sumption 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 princ.i.p.al 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 superst.i.tious, or even mythical. If the G.o.dhead 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 a.s.syrian 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 x.x.xi. 12 seq.; Ezekiel xx. 12, 20), the second the rainbow (Genesis ix. 12), the third circ.u.mcision (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 G.o.d promises that his posterity by Sarah shall possess the land of Canaan, and this is further a.s.sured 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, G.o.d reveals Himself to Abraham as El Shaddai, and under this name He also manifests Himself to Isaac (xxviii. 3) and Jacob (x.x.xv. 11), repeating to them the promise of the possession of the land. It is pointed out with emphasis that G.o.d 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 circ.u.mcision, and at last sacrifice, under Moses? It is natural that Jacob at Bethel should give t.i.thes 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 G.o.d of their fathers, to whom he directed his people,--and yet a theory which, from the correlation between Jehovah the G.o.d 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 G.o.d to Pharaoh, and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet," is a degradation of the corresponding pa.s.sage, iv. 16 "Aaron shall be to thee for a mouth, and thou shalt be to him for a G.o.d." 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 G.o.d 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 circ.u.mcise 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 circ.u.mcises 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 circ.u.mcision before his marriage. In other words, the circ.u.mcision of male infants is here explained as a milder subst.i.tute for the original circ.u.mcision 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 circ.u.mcision 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 x.x.xiv. Shechem has to submit to circ.u.mcision before marriage.

the Priestly Code inst.i.tutes the circ.u.mcision of male children on the eighth day after birth. This inst.i.tution 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 a.s.sociated. 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 princ.i.p.al 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 G.o.d 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 att.i.tude 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 circ.u.mcision. In this they are like

I The Sabbath is not a Mosaic inst.i.tution 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 circ.u.mcision 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 circ.u.mstances 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 ma.s.s 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 Ma.s.sah 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 inst.i.tution 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 Ma.s.sah 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 Ma.s.sah 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 const.i.tuting 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 inst.i.tution 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 x.x.xiii.