Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/414

ISRAEL 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. Moses This feeling Moses was the first to elicit ; he it was also and the wuo ma i n tained it in life and cherished its growth. The Torall> extraordinary set of circumstances which had first occasioned the new national movement continued to subsist, though iu 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 them selves 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. Jehovah. 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 iu 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 (Judg. 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 tho development. But although tho 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 per manent court at the places of worship where in times of quietude men clung to Hirn 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 Thaark. 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 God head, 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 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 The the matters of religion before they became matters of obliga- cra<?y. tion and civil order ; this is all that is really meant when a theocracy is spoken of. Moses certainly organized 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 unorganized 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 obvi ously 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 realized 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 con tinued to be, consciously, rooted in religion, which prevented 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.