It is impossible to discuss these problems here. It must suffice to say that they arise in part from the attempt to harmonize radically different representations of what the fundamental law given at Sinai (or h.o.r.eb) was, in part from the tendency of later times to ascribe to the original Mosaic legislation the whole body of actual law regarded as having a religious sanction. To the latter cause we may without hesitation attribute, for example, the introduction of the fragmentary remains of a Palestinian civil code in Exod. 21-22, to which other remnants of diverse origin have been attached, as well as the great ma.s.s of ritual and ceremonial laws which are thrust into the framework of P.
The fundamental law of J, the basis of the original compact between Jehovah and Israel, is preserved in Exod. x.x.xiv. 1-5, 10a, 14-28 (with some manifest amplifications in vss. 15, 16, 24). When this was combined with the story of the golden calf and the broken tables (E), it was necessary to take it as a _renewal_ of the law, and this was accomplished by very slight additions in vss. 1 and 4 ("like unto the first," "that were on the first tables, which thou brakest").
What the h.o.r.eb const.i.tution in E originally was, is less confidently to be determined. In the form in which E was read by the authors of Deut. 5 and of ix. 8-x. 5 (end of the seventh century or later), it was the Decalogue _only_ (Deut. v. 22 f.); but it is not certain that this was the oldest representation. There are other evidences that E was revised and enlarged in the seventh century by an author who was influenced by the prophets, particularly by Hosea; and the story of the golden calf (with which the Decalogue narrative is closely connected), a condemnation in advance of the Israelite worship of Jehovah in the image of a bull, may have been introduced in this edition, as the repudiation of the sacrifice of children to Jehovah in the story of Abraham and Isaac (Gen. 22) probably was.
In P the case is clearer. According to his theory all the ordinances of worship were revealed at Sinai. Legitimate sacrifice presupposes one legitimate temple and altar, a legitimate priesthood, and a minutely prescribed ritual. In J and E the patriarchs set up altars and offer sacrifice in many places; it is an obvious interest of the authors, or of the local legends of holy places which they follow, to trace the origin of the altars, sacred stones, holy trees and wells, at Shechem or Bethel, Hebron or Beersheba, to one of the forefathers.
In P, on the contrary, the patriarchs never offer sacrifice. Until the tabernacle was erected and G.o.d"s presence filled it, until Aaron was consecrated as priest, until the technique of the various species of offering had been revealed by G.o.d and exemplified by Moses or Aaron, no sacrifice could be anything but impious, like the worship of heathen.
Accordingly, the first thing G.o.d does when Moses goes up into the mount is to give him plans and specifications for a sacred tent--a portable temple--with all its furniture, an altar for sacrifice in the court before it, the vestments of the priests, and the apparatus of the high-priestly oracle, and to reveal in detail the ritual for the consecration of priests (Exod. 25-30). The making of the tabernacle and all the other things necessary for the complete cultus is described in Exod. 35-40; the consecration of the priests and the inaugural sacrifices by Aaron in Lev. 8-9; Lev. x. 1-7 is closely connected with cc. 8-9, and its sequel (combined with other matter) is found in c. 16, the ritual of atonement. Lev. 8-9 is a good specimen of the author"s method. In the form of a description of the sacrifices of consecration and the inaugural sacrifices of Aaron, he gives a paradigm for every variety of offering.
Here was obviously a natural place to introduce laws prescribing the ritual of these species of sacrifice and the circ.u.mstances which demand them, and accordingly we find in Lev. 1-7 a collection of such laws, some of them (e.g. Lev. 1 and 3) unquestionably old both in substance and formulation, with slight adaptation to their surrounding (e.g. "the sons of Aaron," i. 5, etc.), or with supplements to meet new economic and social conditions, such as the burnt offering of doves (Lev. i. 14-17, cf. vs. 2); others are younger or have been more extensively enlarged and amended. The chapters thus represent a growth in actual custom and corresponding rule. In c. 4 we may observe an example of another kind of legal growth, namely, the systematic development of principles or ideas. The scale of sin-offerings, graduated by the social station of the sinner--the high priest, the whole people, the prince, a common citizen--is consistently thought out in conformity with a theory. Observe that the prince is a.s.signed a modest place next the bottom, below the religious community corporately, while the priest takes his at the top. We can say with full confidence that this elaborate ritual is not the booking of usage, but is a product of sacerdotal theory; and, further, that so long as kings reigned, the most high-church ecclesiastic is not likely to have arrogated so much to himself, or, at least, to have proclaimed his ambitions. Only in days when, under foreign governors, the high priest was really the greatest man in the community is such a table of precedence conceivable. Whether even then this law was actually put in operation, may be an open question.
The position of the sacrificial laws, Lev. 1-7, explains itself, as has been said. In many other cases, however, we see no reason why a subject is brought in where it is. Thus, Lev. 11-15, on various forms of uncleanness and the prescribed purifications, to which x. 10 f.
seems to be a fragmentary introduction, have no obvious a.s.sociation with anything in the context, though they are introduced appropriately enough before the general purification of the Day of Atonement, c. 16.
The laws, which read like the chapters of an exactly formulated code of purity, have been expanded by the addition of new paragraphs (e.g.
Lev. xiv. 21-32, 33-53), and in some cases changes in the ritual may be recognized; compare, for example, Lev. xiv. 1-8 with vss. 10-20.
Chapters 17-26 form a distinct body of law, having certain marked peculiarities of its own, notably the frequent recurrence of the motive of "holiness"--that is, the avoidance of things and actions tabooed by the religion of Israel--often coupled with the appeal to G.o.d"s holiness, as in xix. 2, "Ye shall be holy, for I, Jehovah, your G.o.d, am holy," or simply a.s.serting his authority, "I am Jehovah." On the other hand, much in the laws of this Holiness Book (H), as it now stands, has close affinity to the ma.s.s of ritual and ceremonial laws in Leviticus and Numbers. The hypothesis which seems best to explain the phenomena is that an independent collection of laws (or rather the remains of such a collection), characterized by the motive of holiness, has been expanded and edited in the spirit and manner of the priestly legislation, while some laws which were originally included in this collection have been transposed to other contexts.
The Holiness Book closed with an earnest exhortation and warning to observe all these laws, promising the blessing of G.o.d on obedience and depicting in strong colours the calamities with which he will punish defection (Lev. 26). The position and prophetic tenour of this chapter resemble Deut. 28, and the book in its original form is apparently the product of the same age with Deuteronomy.
The Origins (P) described in Exod. 28 f. and Lev. 8 f. the choice of Aaron and his sons to be priests and their installation in the sacred office. The inferior order of the ministry of the sanctuary, the levites, is not as yet inst.i.tuted. This is done in Numbers, and indeed with a certain redundancy, for Num. 3 and 4 independently deal with the subject, and c. 18 takes it up afresh without any allusion to a previous appointment. Much stress is laid on the exclusive prerogative of Aaron and his sons in the service of the altar and the ministry "within the veil"; no levite, much less a layman, may presume to these sacred functions on pain of death. The levites are given to Aaron and his sons as temple slaves for the menial work of the sanctuary, in place of the first-born Israelites of all tribes who would naturally be dedicated to G.o.d, i.e. to the temple. Yet, as ministers of religion, they are supported by a general t.i.the of the products of the soil imposed on all the people.
The laws in Numbers present the same variety as in Leviticus. There are old laws with modifications and enlargements, and many others which by various signs betray a more recent origin. Num. 28-36 belong as a whole to the latter cla.s.s; cc. 28 f. exemplify that growth of the law by the formulation of sacerdotal ideals or desiderata which has been noted in the case of Lev. 4. It is to be observed that the narrative of P has reached in Num. xxvii. 12-23 the end of Moses"
career; nothing is in place after it but the ascent of Mt. Abarim and Moses" death (Deut. 34). Num. 28-36 thus stand even formally in the place of an appendix.
The narrative of P (Origin of the Religious Inst.i.tutions) and the great ma.s.s of ritual and ceremonial laws in the three middle books of the Pentateuch are often called collectively the Priests" Code. The name naturally suggests to the English reader an orderly body of law, compiled, revised, and promulgated by some authority; and, in fact, many critics--except for the orderliness, which n.o.body has ventured to affirm, and with allowance for later additions--regard the Priests"
Code as such a law book, compiled and edited by priestly scribes in Babylonia, brought to Judaea by Ezra, with the authority of the Persian king, to reform the many disorders that existed there, and ratified and put in force in B.C. 444 by the magnates and the people of the Jews. (See Ezra 7; Neh. 8-10, and below, pp. 129 ff.) Internal evidence of such an origin and destination is, however, sought in vain in the laws; the things that Ezra and Nehemiah were most zealous about, especially the veto on mixed marriages, do not stand out in the so-called Priests" Code as they do in other parts of the law, while about a reform of the cultus in Jerusalem in conformity with a new ritual introduced from Babylonia, the story of Ezra"s doings is significantly silent.
The phenomena we have observed in Exodus-Numbers suggest the hypothesis, rather, that various old laws, dealing chiefly with sacrifice and with the rules of clean and unclean--the two princ.i.p.al subjects of priestly regulation--were inserted at suitable points in the Origins of the Religious Inst.i.tutions (P); these received amendments and supplements both before and after their incorporation; other more independent developments, whether representing actual custom or sacerdotal aspirations, found place among or beside them; and thus the whole Priestly stratum grew by a process of accretion through many generations into its present inorganic magnitude. It is antecedently probable that this process went on in Palestine, where the ritual laws were a practical concern, rather than in the schools of Babylonia; and only strong evidence to the contrary could overcome this presumption.
CHAPTER VI
DEUTERONOMY
Deuteronomy purports to contain the laws under which Israel is to live in the land of Canaan. It deals with the conditions of an agricultural people, settled in towns and villages, in the presence of a native population to the contamination of whose religion and morals the Israelites are exposed. This legislation was revealed to Moses at h.o.r.eb (Deut. v. 28-33), but, inasmuch as it was not to go into effect until Israel was established in the possession of Canaan, being in fact wholly inapplicable to nomadic conditions--a consideration of which P, in its code of worship, is oblivious--it was not promulgated till the moment when the people, encamped opposite Jericho, was on the point of invading Palestine. Then the aged Moses, about to lay down his office and his life, delivers to the people, in national a.s.sembly, the law by which they are in future to be governed, and adds his most urgent injunctions and solemn warnings to be faithful to their religion and the law of their G.o.d.
The book is thus almost wholly in the form of address, and the hortatory note is insistent. As an introduction, Moses briefly recalls the history of the wanderings, from h.o.r.eb on, impressing at every turn the lessons of their experience (Deut. 1-3); the material is taken chiefly from E"s narrative, which it was intended to supersede in an independent Book of Deuteronomy. There follows a hortatory discourse (iv. 1-40), closely akin to cc. 29-30. The last acts and the death of Moses are narrated in confused fashion in c. 31; x.x.xii. 48-52; 34. The Song of Moses (c. 32), and the Blessing of Moses (c. 33), are apparently independent compositions which have been given an appropriate place at the end of the book. The core of Deuteronomy is cc. 5-11; 12-26; 28. Speaking generally, the first part (cc. 5-11) expounds the fundamental principles of religion, while the second (cc.
12-26) contains special laws, and, as a fitting and effective conclusion of the whole, c. 28 sets forth the blessings which G.o.d will bestow on Israel if it keeps his commandments, and the curses it will incur by unfaithfulness and disobedience. The special laws, particularly in Deut. 22 ff., are similar in character to those in Exod. 21-23 and in Lev. 17-25, and doubtless embody in the main ancient custom; but beside them are provisions of a singularly Utopian kind, such as those on the conduct of war in c. 20 and the septennial cancelling of all debts (xv. 1-11).
The conception of religion which dominates the whole book, but is most conspicuous in cc. 5-11, is the highest in the Old Testament. There is but one G.o.d, supreme in might and majesty, constant in purpose, faithful to his word, just but compa.s.sionate; he is not to be imaged or imagined in the likeness of anything in heaven or on earth; idolatry, divination, and sorcery are strictly forbidden. The essence of religion is love (Deut. vi. 4), the love of G.o.d to his people and their responsive love to him is the ruling motive in worship and conduct. In the relations of men to their fellows, whether countrymen or strangers and to the brute creation, humanity and charity are the prime virtues; the Utopian features of the laws are such only because they push the ideal of humanity too hard for unideal human nature.
What is most characteristic in the Deuteronomic legislation, the thing on which it dwells with insistent iteration, is that Jehovah will be worshipped only at one place, to be chosen by himself in the territory of one of the tribes. There all sacrifices must be offered, all festivals celebrated. At the head of the special laws this fundamental article is repeatedly laid down (Deut. xii. 13-19--seemingly the oldest formulation--xii. 2-7, 8-12, 20-27), and it recurs in connection with the laws concerning the disposition of G.o.d"s share in man"s increase (t.i.thes, firstlings, etc.) and the annual festivals (Pa.s.sover, Tabernacles).
This was an innovation which dislocated the whole system of religious observances, and the Deuteronomic legislation had to provide for the direct and indirect consequences of so radical a change. By ancient custom the religious dues were rendered and sacrifices offered at the village altars ("high places"), and there also the festivals were kept which marked the seasons of the husbandman"s year; beside the altar, with a simple religious rite, domestic animals were slaughtered whenever hospitality or a family festival gave occasion. If a man visited a more renowned sanctuary at a distance from his home, he did it of his own accord and in his own time and way. The feasts at the village altars, at which custom prescribed open hospitality, were a G.o.dsend to the poor of the community, many of whom would else seldom have tasted flesh or eaten their fill. The Deuteronomic law licenses the slaughter of animals at home without any religious rite, and introduces a plan of charity t.i.thes to replace the hospitality of the altar. Its concern for the levites (that is, the priests of the local sanctuaries), who by the new arrangement were left without a livelihood, is also to be noted.
The motives for this radical change in immemorial religious custom are characteristic. In the first place, the "high places" had been seats of Canaanite worship before they were taken possession of by the Israelites, and not only did the stigma of aboriginal heathenism cling to them, but, in fact, many heathenish doings were perpetuated at them--drunken debauches and consecrated prost.i.tution. But, further, their existence seemed to be incompatible with strict monotheism: the many G.o.ds were worshipped in many places; the _one_ G.o.d seemed to have as corollary _one_ place of worship. As a matter of experience, the localizing of Jehovah at numerous sanctuaries--Dan, Bethel, Gilgal, Beersheba--with their distinctive traditions and local peculiarities of ritual, doubtless did result, for the apprehension of the common man, in making a local Jehovah, as happens to the Virgin and the Saints in Catholic countries. For the Deuteronomist this was only another kind of polytheism: "Hear, O Israel, Jehovah, our G.o.d, is _one_ Jehovah!"
Deuteronomy is, therefore, the programme of a reform. Fortunately, we know how this programme was put in execution; the history of it is written in 2 Kings 22-23. In the course of some repairs in the temple in Jerusalem, a law book turned up, the reading of which threw King Josiah and his advisers into consternation. After taking counsel of a prophetess, an a.s.sembly was convoked, and the book publicly ratified by the notables and the people as the law of the realm. Thereupon the king proceeded to put the code in force. He not only cleaned house in the temple in Jerusalem, where a miscellany of foreign G.o.ds and cults was installed, but he destroyed and desecrated all the "high places,"
that is, the immemorial seats of the worship of Jehovah in the towns and villages of his kingdom, pulling the altars to pieces, smashing the stone pillars, hewing down the sacred poles, and forcibly carrying off the priests (levites) to Jerusalem, where he a.s.signed them a living from the income of the temple, but--in his zeal going beyond the law of Deut. xviii. 6-8--excluded them from sacrificial functions.
It was seen long ago by some of the Church Fathers that the law book which Hilkiah found and Josiah enforced can have been no other than Deuteronomy. The historian of the kingdoms, writing after the reforms of Josiah and the following reaction and believing that the prohibition of worship at the high places had been binding since the building of Solomon"s temple, is at pains to say that none of the kings from Solomon to Josiah, not even those to whom otherwise he gives the best mark for piety, had paid any attention to this law, with the sole exception of a brief attempt by Hezekiah. We can go further, and say that none of the older historians and none of the prophets of the ninth and eighth centuries show any acquaintance with such a prohibition. If the prophets a.s.sail the worship at the high places, as Hosea does, it is on the ground that it is heathenish and immoral, not that it is illegitimate; if Hosea condemns the pilgrimages to Gilgal and Beersheba, it is not implied that it would be better to go to Jerusalem; nor, indeed, is any condemnation of the worship at the high places more drastic than Isaiah"s of the cultus in Jerusalem. Before the latter part of the seventh century there is no thought that Jehovah has such an exclusive preference for Solomon"s temple.
All the other evidence in Deuteronomy points to the same age. Its conception of G.o.d and of religion is derived from the prophets of the eighth century. The influence of Hosea is particularly plain: that the essence of religion is love is Hosea"s idea, if there is such a thing as originality in religion. The language and style of Deuteronomy are of the seventh century, in its excellences and in its defects; Jeremiah and the author of Kings have the closest resemblance to it in its rhetorical manner and in its peculiar pathos.
On these grounds, since the latter part of the eighteenth century, an increasing number of scholars have held that the book was written in the second half of the seventh century for the purpose of bringing about a revolution such as actually followed its well-timed discovery; and this is now the opinion of almost all who admit that the common principles of historical criticism are applicable to Biblical literature.
Deuteronomy is not all of one piece, as has already been pointed out.
Many older laws were taken up into it at the beginning or introduced subsequently; considerable additions were made to it after Josiah"s time, and even after the fall of Judah, for in several pa.s.sages that catastrophe and the dispersion of the people are an accomplished fact, an existing situation. It is only the reform programme and what hangs together with it that can be definitely dated.
CHAPTER VII
AGE OF THE SOURCES, COMPOSITION OF THE PENTATEUCH
Deuteronomy is a fixed point, by reference to which the age of other strata in the Pentateuch may be determined, at least relatively. Thus in P the patriarchs never offer sacrifice at the ancient holy places of Canaan, and the notion that legitimate sacrifice can be made only on one altar is so fundamental an article of religion that the first thing at Sinai is the construction of the tabernacle to be transported from one station to another in the desert. The inference is plain that P was written at a time when the principle of the unity of the sanctuary for which Deuteronomy contends with the zeal of innovation was no longer disputed, at least in the author"s surroundings, so that he has no need to enjoin it, and can, indeed, ignore the fact that there ever had been other sanctuaries of Jehovah. Such a state of things never existed while the kingdom stood; it was only in the Persian period, when Judaea was reduced to a circle of a few miles about Jerusalem, that the conditions implied in P arose. Only in that age, through political circ.u.mstances, did the high priests attain the pre-eminence to which P gives the sanction of divine right; and P itself not obscurely witnesses that these towering pretensions did not go unchallenged (see especially Num. 16). With this all the other evidence concurs: the supramundane conception of G.o.d and the avoidance of everything that seems to bring the deity into too close contact with earthly things or tempts the imagination to figure him too humanly speak of the progress of theological reflection. The language is plainly in decadence: apart from words which seem to be new, and occasionally foreign, the sentence is losing its flexibility, or authors are losing their mastery of it; it is only necessary to compare even the best pa.s.sages in P (such as Gen. 23) with examples of really cla.s.sical Hebrew prose (say, in 2 Sam. 11 ff. or the stories of Elijah in Kings), on the one hand, and with the writing of the Chronicler (third century B.C.), on the other, to see that P is nearer to the latter than to the former.
The age of the laws now set in the framework of the Origins is a distinct question, or rather, as will be understood from what has been said above, it is a separate question for every law, and often for successive paragraphs of the same law. And behind the question of the age of the law in its present formulation is frequently the remoter problem of the age of the inst.i.tution or custom. Various criteria are available in the history of the Kingdoms, in the prophets, in other collections of laws, and in Ezekiel"s programme for the New Jerusalem (Ezek. 40 ff.). It must be enough here to say that the older laws in P go back, substantially in their present shape, to the days of the kingdom, and in many cases represent a prescriptive usage which is of remote antiquity; while the latest additions to P were made at a time so recent that they had not found entry into the copies from which the earliest Greek version was made in the third century B.C.
J and E are both older than Deuteronomy. In Genesis, as has already been noted, they recite the foundation legends of Shechem, Bethel, Hebron, Beersheba, and other of the holy places of Canaan, telling how the patriarchs built the altars, set up the sacred stones, planted the sacred trees, dug the holy wells, and offered sacrifice to their own G.o.d at these spots, by this origin legitimating as Israelite sanctuaries what were, at the time of the conquest and long after, Canaanite "high places." Similarly, in Joshua, Gilgal and Shiloh are Israelite foundations. These were all, in the time of the kingdoms, holy places of great repute, frequented by pilgrims from distant quarters; but there were others, of less ancient pretensions, which attained equal celebrity. Dan, for instance, which came into the hands of the Israelites in the time of the Judges, claimed a priesthood descended from Moses, and became proverbial for the tenacity with which the good old traditions of Israel were preserved there.
The narratives in Judges, Samuel, and Kings show that every town and village had its own holy place, with an altar and a sacred stone, and sometimes a hall for feasts (e.g. 1 Sam. ix. 22), and that temporary altars were built whenever and wherever there was reason. This practice is presumed in an ancient fragment of a law, Exod. xx. 24-26, which prescribes that all offerings must be made at an altar, which may be a mound of earth or a heap of field-stones (not hewn stone), and promises that at every place where G.o.d has given signs of his presence he will come to the sacrifice and bless the offerer. This rule, which probably originally stood in the context of J, expressly sanctions the local altars and sacrifices which are so abhorrent to the deuteronomic reformers of the seventh century.
On the other hand, the strong interest in the origins of the holy places of Canaan indicates that when J and E were written these high places were Israelite sanctuaries, which had as such their sacred legends; indeed, a considerable part of the patriarchal stories is ultimately derived from these legends of local sanctuaries, which form a cycle, harmonized and connected by a migration motive. That both J and E were written long after the settlement of the Israelites in Palestine is proved even more conclusively by the fact that the obligatory religious observances are those of an agricultural people.
Thus in Exod. 34, in what was probably according to J the organic law of the religion of Jehovah, and is indisputably the oldest collection of religious laws in the Pentateuch, three festivals are ordained, at which every male is bound "to see the face of Jehovah," that is, to appear at the high place with his offering--he is warned not to try to "see Jehovah" without something in his hands--namely, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Weeks,[2] and the Feast of Ingathering in the end of the year. The first of these, as we know, came at the beginning of the barley harvest, at the second the firstfruits of the wheat harvest were presented, the third celebrated the close of the vintage and the olive-pressing. The firstlings of the flock and herd, if we may infer from the order of the prescriptions, were to be offered at the feast of Unleavened Bread in the Spring. The sabbath is to be kept as a day of abstention from agricultural labour, "even in ploughing-time and harvest thou shalt rest." The occupations of a nomad go on one day like another; the care of the flocks cannot be suspended for sabbath-keeping.
[2] The older name, Harvest Feast, is preserved in the parallel, Exod.
xxiii. 16.
It is difficult to reconstruct the narratives of the exodus and the wanderings in the desert in J and E as they originally were. Extensive transpositions seem to have been made at some stage in the transmission, by which parallel relations of the same occurrence are separated and appear as distinct events. There were evidently considerable differences in the traditional accounts which the earliest authors found current. The holy mountain is in E named h.o.r.eb, in J (probably) as in P, Sinai; Moses" father-in-law in the one is Jethro, in the other Hobab. In J there are some traces of a tradition, perhaps the oldest of all, in which there was no mention of Sinai; the Israelites made their way straight from the Red Sea to Kadesh.
A comparison of J and E with the history of the times of Saul and David in Samuel, and with the stories of Elijah and Elisha in Kings, would lead us to ascribe them both to the cla.s.sic age of Hebrew prose of which those narratives are specimens. On the other hand, in J and the older stratum of E there is no influence of the prophetic movement of the eighth century which left so deep a mark on religion and literature. On these grounds J may be probably ascribed to the ninth century, and E, which is somewhat younger, to the first half of the eighth. Both used older sources, and both were revised and enlarged by later hands; we have had more than one occasion to refer to an edition of E which reflects the teaching of the prophets, particularly of Hosea.
These two histories--the one, as we have seen, Judaean, the other Israelite--ran so nearly parallel and contained so much matter in common that an attempt to combine them in one continuous narrative was natural. The task was accomplished with considerable skill, by a Judaean historian in the seventh century, who probably introduced variants or supplementary matter from other sources. The author"s own hand is most certainly recognized in the multiplied and emphasized warnings against all sorts of heathenism and in a fine tone of religious reflection on the history and its lessons, in which the influence of the prophets is plainly visible, but the peculiar theories of the seventh century historians do not appear. Whether this history (JE) extended beyond the Book of Joshua, and if so where it ended, are questions which must be reserved for later consideration.
It is the general opinion that the next stage in the growth of the Hexateuch (Genesis-Joshua) was the inclusion in a new edition of JE of the Book of Deuteronomy in the form and dimensions which it had attained in the generation after the fall of Judah; and, perhaps in connection with this, the history of the conquest in Joshua as narrated in JE was recast and much enlarged by an author who was full of the ideas and phrases of Deuteronomy.
At a considerably later time, perhaps in the fifth century B.C., or even in the fourth, the Origins of the Religious Inst.i.tutions, a product of the Persian period, with the ma.s.s of laws that had been incorporated in it (see above p. 57), was united with JED, thus bringing together into one volume all that was preserved about the history down to the conquest of Canaan and all the various inst.i.tutions and collections of laws which were attributed to Moses.
The author of this comprehensive work, as was most natural, took P, with its sharply marked divisions and outstanding epochs, as his basis, and introduced in each period the parts of JE which seemed to him to belong there. Where P had a parallel narrative, as in the story of the Flood, he wove the strands together with more or less ingenuity, omitting, in ordinary cases, only the most palpable doublets. It is possible that the same author first incorporated in P a large part of the so-called priestly laws; it is more certain that, besides the harmonistic changes necessary in combining his sources, he made numerous additions; but there is usually no way of distinguishing his hand from that of earlier or of still later editors.
This hypothesis, which, for all its seeming complexity, is doubtless a great simplification of the actual literary history, is accepted by the majority of Old Testament scholars--with many variations in particulars, it need hardly be said. It is commended to the historian, not merely by the fact that it explains the confusion and contradiction which reign in the Pentateuch and offers a solution of its literary problems, but that, when the sources are distinguished and reconstructed and their age and relations determined, they become historical sources of great value for the times in which they were respectively written, confirming, supplementing, or interpreting the evidence of the historical books and the prophets, and contributing important material of various kinds to our knowledge of civilization in ancient Israel and of its religious development.