The History of the Ancient Civilizations. Duncker Max
forsaken him. The Israelites mourned for Moses thirty days in the plains of Moab, and henceforth there was no prophet in Israel like Moses; and to this day no man knows the grave of Moses.
In those portions which deal with the abode and fortunes of the Hebrews in the desert, the two texts were less closely combined, and the contradictions are more numerous, than in the other parts. The two narratives are interpolated each into the other, and the additions of the reviser are more prominent than elsewhere. An ancient record, embodied in the first text, gives a list of the places where the Israelites pitched their tents between Egypt and the Jordan. The statements do not agree with the narrative in its present condition. In the first text the Midianites manifestly dwell to the east of the Jordan. It represents the Israelites as taking vengeance upon them, because they had seduced Israel to a heathenish ritual; first by the act of Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, whose seed in consequence received "the everlasting covenant of the priesthood," and then by the war which cost the Midianites a vast booty of sheep, oxen, asses, and thousands of prisoners.[650] In the Ephraimitic text the Midianites dwell on Sinai; hither Moses fled to the Midianites from Egypt; he married the daughter of the priest of the Midianites, and stands in most friendly relations with them. This text represents the seduction of the Israelites as the work not of the Midianites, but of the Moabites; and subsequently narrates the victories over the Moabites of Heshbon and Bashan. How the first text described the conquest of the land of Gilead we cannot any longer ascertain; that it dealt with the subject is beyond question.[651]
The setting up of the golden calf at Sinai is inconceivable in the connection in which the narrative places it. While Jehovah's glory is visible on Sinai, and proclaims itself in thunder and lightning, would the people, and Aaron at their head, have required an image of God, and offered prayer to it? When after the death of Solomon the ten tribes founded their independent kingdom Jehovah was worshipped among them in the form of a bull, in contrast to the worship of the kingdom of Judah. To stigmatise this worship, wherein priests of the family which claimed to be derived from Aaron may have taken part from the first, as objectionable, the prophetic revision has interpolated the adoration of the golden calf and the punishment of such idolatry; and from this the second ascent of Sinai by Moses came into the narrative. The account of the saraphs and the setting up of the brazen serpent belongs to the Ephraimitic text.[652] At Jerusalem there was a serpent of brass, which was thought to have come down from Moses.[653]
It was the fixed belief of the Hebrews that it was only by the immediate help of Jehovah that their forefathers had been able to escape the power of Egypt. And this was not the only thing done for their fathers; they had afterwards gained abodes to the east and west of the Jordan, and from the wilderness they had come into a land flowing with milk and honey. Here, also, the help of Jehovah had been shown forth mightily for his people, against the old and powerful cities, and the mountain fortresses of Canaan. Obviously Jehovah had delivered his people out of Egypt, in order to give them this beautiful and rich land for a dwelling. But why had he not at once led them thither? Why did the Israelites remain so long in the miserable wilderness? The Israelites—so the first text explains this delay—received the account of the spies with fear. This cowardly generation, therefore, must die out. We saw above that the Hebrews reckoned the length of a generation at forty years, and so the first text puts the sojourn in the desert at forty years. We shall see below that this period is too short by some decads of years. Moses and Aaron also did not reach Canaan, because, as the first text says, "they sinned against Jehovah at the water of strife, at Kadesh, in the wilderness of Sin," because "they rebelled against his command at the water," an obstinacy which cannot be any longer found in the revised narrative of this occurrence.[654] If Joshua and Caleb are exempted from this decree, if they alone reach Canaan, it was certain that Joshua had undertaken and carried out the attack upon Canaan, that Caleb conquered Hebron and subjected the surrounding district; his descendants were living there even in David's time in princely wealth.
In the desert also Jehovah had taken care of his people; he had not allowed them to perish there; he had sent quails and given them manna. Even now long lines of quails pass over the Syrian steppes and the wilderness of Sinai, and in the neighbourhood of Firan, manna, i.e. the juice running from the branches and leaves of the tamarisk, is still gathered.[655] Nor had Jehovah allowed water to fail in the midst of the desert. Moses changed a bitter spring into sweet water. The story rests, no doubt, on the name of the spring. Marah means bitter. At another spring of the name of Meribah, i.e. strife (here Jehovah bade the rocks give water), the rebellion of Moses and Aaron is said to have taken place. The well of Beer, which the princes dug, cannot be any other than the well of Beer Elim, i.e. the well of the strong,[656] and the song which tradition connects with this place (p. 473) is certainly very old, if not contemporary.
The law made known to Moses on Sinai forms the main portion of the second, third, and fourth books of the Pentateuch. It not only contains the fundamental moral rules, the ordinances of the law of family and blood-feud, and the rubrics for the national worship; it is rather a law for the priesthood, given in systematic detail, which fixes their position, rights, and honours, the dress of their office, and the fees for the sacrifice—a wide collection of regulations for the ritual of sacrifice, descending into the smallest minutiæ, the place of worship, the instruments of sacrifice, the celebration of festivals, and the arrangement of life in the future dwellings of the tribes. Could tribes wandering in the desert have made rules for the celebration of the festivals of sowing, of harvest, and of the vintage? Could they have settled what part of the produce of the field should be given to the priests, and how they should deal with the fallow time of the seventh year of rest, and the reversion of the alienated land in the year of Jubilee? Could dwellers in tents make regulations about receiving the stranger in their gates, about cities of refuge and cities of the Levites? And even if this had really taken place, how are we to explain the fact that whole groups of arrangements for worship and life which these laws prescribe were demonstrably not in existence among the Hebrews in the centuries following their wandering? Laws are never created except in connection with definite circumstances; no lawgiver can anticipate the relations which the future will bring into existence, and answer, à priori, the questions which will then arise.
It is therefore beyond doubt that views and tendencies of later development and the results of a long course of growth have been transferred to early times, the times of the exodus from Egypt. Those early days had been an era of original piety, and the time of the exodus had been a period in which the God of the fathers had guided and led them with a mighty hand, in which he had announced to them his will directly and without deception. The condition of religious service and life, therefore, which was held to be the true and proper kind must have been prescribed in those early days and have existed then; the ideal after which men were to strive, and in the pursuit of which every hindrance was to be removed, must have already existed in those days of direct divine guidance. Thus ordinances and usages which arose successively after the settlement in Canaan, were amalgamated with older customs and rules, and united into one system, which seemed to the priests the necessary system, appointed by God and pleasing to him. The position which the first text ascribes to Aaron, and which the laws attached to that text, give to the priests and Levites the prominence of a centralised, rich, and even splendid ritual, and of a single place for the worship of Jehovah, display the tendency which was active in the priesthood, to concentrate the worship of Jehovah on a single spot, and to obtain power in the state for the chief priests. The gorgeous tabernacle erected near Mount Sinai with the portable altars for burnt sacrifice and incense, the implements of sacrifice and the candlestick of seven branches, can only have been taken from the tabernacle erected by David, and afterwards from the temple of Solomon and its glory, the sacred pattern of which ought to be recognised in the movable sanctuary already erected by Moses on Mount Sinai. At the same time the rich adornment of this pattern by the voluntary