Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/535

PENTATEUCH 509 The new ideas lay dormant for thirty years, when they I were revived through a pupil of Keuss, K. H. Graf. He u 1 too was deemed at first to offer an easy victory to the weapons of "critical analysis," which found many vulner able points in the original statement of his views. For, while Graf placed the legislation of the middle books very late, holding it to have been framed after the great captivity, he at first still held fast to the doctrine of the great antiquity of the so-called Elohist of Genesis (in the sense which that term bore before Hupfeld s discovery), thus violently rend ing the Priestly Code in twain, and separating its members by an interval of half a millennium. This he was compelled to do, because, for Genesis at least, he still adhered to the supplementary hypothesis, according to which the Jehovist worked on the basis laid by the (priestly) Elohist. Here, however, he was tying himself by bonds which had been already loosed by Hupfeld ; and, as literary criticism actu ally stood, it could show no reason for holding that the Jehovist was necessarily later than the Elohist. In the end, therefore, literary criticism offered itself as Graf s auxiliary. Following a hint of Kuenen s, he embraced the proffered alliance, gave up the violent attempt to divide the Priestly Code, and proceeded without further obstacle to extend to the historical part of that code as found in Genesis those conclusions which he had already established for its main or legislative part. Graf himself did not live to see the victory of his cause. His Goel, to speak with the ancient Hebrews, was Professor A. Kuenen of Leyden, who has had the chief share in the task of developing and enforcing the hypothesis of Graf. 1 The characteristic feature in the hypothesis of Graf is that the Priestly Code is placed later than Deuteronomy, so that the order is no longer Priestly Code, Jehovist, Deuteronomy, but Jehovist, Deuteronomy, Priestly Code. The method of inquiry has been already indicated ; the three strata of the Pentateuch are compared with one another, and at the same time the investigator seeks to place them in their proper relation to the successive phases of Hebrew history as these are known to us from other and undisputed evidence. The process may be shortened if it be taken as agreed that the date of Deuteronomy is known from 2 Kings xxii. ; for this gives us at starting a fixed point, to which the less certain points can be referred. The method can be applied alike to the historical and legal parts of the three strata of the Hexateuch. For the Jehovist has legislative matter in Exod. xx.-xxiii., xxxiv., and Deuteronomy and the Priestly Code embrace historical matters ; moreover, we always find that the legal stand point of each author influences his presentation of the history, and vice versa. The most important point, how ever, is the comparison of the laws, especially of the laws about worship, with corresponding statements in the his torical and prophetical books. I ori- The turning-point in the history of worship in Israel is the centralization of the cultus in Jerusalem by Josiah (^ Kings xxii., xxiii.). Till then there were in Judah, as for- there had been before in Samaria, a multitude of local en tant qu il s agit du developpement national determine par des lois ocrites, se divisera en deux periodes, avant et apres Josias. 10. Ezechiel est anterieur a la redaction du code rituel et des lois qui ont defmitivement organise la hierarchic. 11. Le livre de Josue n est pas, tant s en faut, la partie la plus vecente de 1 ouvrage entier. 12. Le redacteur du Pentateuque se distingue clairement de 1 ancien propliute Moyse. (Vhistoire sainte et la loi, Paris, 1879, pp. 23, 24.) 1 K. H. Graf, Die geschichtlichen Biicher des A.T., Leipsic, 1866 ; essays by Graf, in Merx s Archiv, i. 225 sq. , 466 sq. ; A. Kuenen, " De priesterlijke Bestanddeelen van Pentateuch en Jozua," in Theol. Tijdschrift, 1870, p. 391 sq., and De Godsdienst van Israel, 2 vols., Haarlem, 1869-70. See also J. Wellhauseii, Prolegomena zur GescMchte Israels, 2d ed., Berlin, 1883 (Eng. tr., Edinburgh, A. & C. Black, 1885) ; the first edition appeared in 1878 as Geschichte Israels, vol. i. sanctuaries, the legitimacy of which no one dreamt of dis puting. If Hezekiah made an attempt to abolish these local shrines, as we are told in 2 Kings xviii. 4, 22, it is yet plain that this attempt was not very serious, as it had been quite forgotten less than a hundred years later. Josiah s reforms were the first that went deep enough to leave a mark on history. Not, indeed, that the high places fell at one blow ; they rose again after the king s death, and the attachment to them finally disappeared only when the Babylonian exile tore the nation from its ancestral soil and forcibly interrupted its traditional customs. The returning exiles were thoroughly imbued with the ideas of Josiah s reform, and had no thought of worshipping except in Jerusalem ; it cost them no sacrifice of their feelings to leave the ruined high places unbuilt. From this date all Jews understood as a matter of course that the one God had only one . sanctuary. Thus we have three distinct historical periods, (1) the period before Josiah, (2) the transition period introduced by Josiah s reforms, and (3) the period after the exile. Can we trace a correspondence between these three historical phases and the laws as to worship ? 1. The principal law-book embodied by the Jehovist, the First so-called Book of the Covenant, takes it for granted in Exod. period. xx. 24-26 that altars are many, not one. Here there is no idea of attaching value to the retention of a single place for the altar ; earth and rough stones are to be found everywhere, and an altar of these materials falls into ruins as easily as it is built. Again, a choice of materials is given, presumably for the construction of different altars, and Jehovah proposes to come to His worshippers and bless them, not in the place where he causes His name to be cele brated, but at every such place. The Jehovistic law there fore agrees with the customary usage of the earlier period of Hebrew history ; and so too does the Jehovistic story, according to which the patriarchs wherever they reside erect altars, set up cippi (mac^eboth), plant trees, and dig wells. The places of which these acts of the patriarchs are related are not fortuitous, they are the same places as were afterwards famous shrines. This is why the narrator speaks of them ; his interest in the sites is not antiquarian, but corresponds to the practical importance they held in the worship of his own day. The altar which Abraham built at Shechem is the same on which sacrifices still con tinued to be offered ; Jacob s anointed stone at Bethel was still anointed, and tithes were still offered at it in fulfil ment of vows, in the writer s own generation. The things which a later generation deemed offensive and heathenish high places, ma^ebotk, sacred trees, and wells all appear here as consecrated by patriarchal precedent, and the narra tive can only be understood as a picture of what daily took place in the first century or thereabout after the division of the kingdoms, thrown back into the past and clothed with ancient authority. 2. The Deuteronomic legislation begins (Deut. xii.), Second just like the Book of the Covenant, with a law for the period, place of worship. But now there is a complete change ; Jehovah is to be worshipped only in Jerusalem and no where else. The new law-book is never weary of repeating this command and developing its consequences in every direction. All this is directed against current usage, against "what we are accustomed to do at this day" ; the law is polemical and aims at reformation. This law therefore belongs to the second period of the history, the time when the party of reform in Jerusalem was attack ing the high places. When we read, then, that King Josiah was moved to destroy the local sanctuaries by the discovery of a law-book, this book, assuming it to be preserved in the Pentateuch, can be none other than the legislative part of Deuteronomy, which must once have had a separate exist-