Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/415

ISRAEL 399 it from quitting or losing its rapport with the soil from which it had originally sprung. With the intermediate and higher stages of political organization, with the build ing of the upper structure, however, religion had no con cern ; they were too far removed from the foundation. The derivative, which did not carry immediately iu 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," accord ingly, meant that every task 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 Gocl, 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 pres sure 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, reli gion 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 enquiry. 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 " parti cularism " of Israel s idea of God was in fact the real strength of Israel s religion ; it thus escaped from barren mythologizings, 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 por tion 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 re mained 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 lias 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 dis tinguished, 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 the founder of the Torah. But the legislative tradition cannot Mosaic tell us what were the positive contents of his Torah. In fact it can Torah. 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 national sense for law and jus tice, 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 How made by him can be derived from the narrative contained in Exod. made, xviii., but not from the long section which follows, relating to the Sinaitic covenant (ch. xix. sqq.). The giving of the law at Sinai has only a formal, not to say dramatic, significance. It is the pro duct 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 expla nation. 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 (Judg. 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 connexion with it, the wilderness of Kadesli becomes the locality of the preceding and subsequent events. It was during the sojourn of many years here that the organization of the nation, in any historical sense, took place. " There lie made for them statute and ordinance, and there he proved them," as we read in Ex. xv. 25 in a dislocated poetical fragment. "Judgment and trial," " Massa andMeribah," point to Kadesh as the place referred to ; there at all events is the scene of the narrative immediately following (Ex. xvii. = Num. xx.), and doubtless also of Ex. xviii. If the legislation of the Pentateuch cease as a whole to be re- The De- garded as an authentic source for our knowledge of what Mosaism calogue. was, it becomes a somewhat precarious matter to make any excep tion in favour of the Decalogue. In particular, the following argu ments against its authenticity must be taken into account. (1) According to Ex. 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 con tinued 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 uni versal code of morals which is given in the Decalogue as the funda mental law of Israel ; but the entire series of religious personalities throughout the period of the judges and the kings from Deborahj, who praised Jael s treacherous act of murder, to David, who caused his prisoners of war to be sawn asunder and burnt 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 Judg. v. than from Ex. xx. (4) It is extremely doubtful whether the actual mono theism which is undoubtedly presupposed 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 cove nant formed by the God of the universe with, in the first instance, Israel alone (compare sects. 6-10). As for the question regarding the historical presuppositions of Mosaism, there generally underlies it a misunderstanding arising