2.  The foregoing remarks are designed merely to make it plain that the problem we have set before us is not an imaginary one, but actual and urgent.  They are intended to introduce it; but to solve it is by no means so easy.  The question what is the historical place of the Law does not even admit of being put in these simple terms.  For the Law, If by that word we understand the entire Pentateuch, is no literary unity, and no simple historical quantity./1/

************************* 1.  Compare the article “Pentateuch” in the Ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. xviii. *************************

Since the days of Peyrerius and Spinoza, criticism has acknowledged the complex character of that remarkable literary production, and from Jean Astruc onwards has laboured, not without success, at disentangling its original elements.  At present there are a number of results that can be regarded as settled.  The following are some of them.  The five Books of Moses and the Book of Joshua constitute one whole, the conquest of the Promised Land rather than the death of Moses forming the true conclusion of the patriarchal history, the exodus, and the wandering in the wilderness.  From a literary point of view, accordingly, it is more accurate to speak of the Hexateuch than of the Pentateuch.  Out of this whole, the Book of Deuteronomy, as essentially an independent law-book, admits of being separated most easily.  Of what remains, the parts most easily distinguished belong to the so-called “main stock” ("Grundschrift"), formerly also called the Elohistic document, on account of the use it makes of the divine name Elohim up to the time of Moses, and designated by Ewald, with reference to the regularly recurring superscriptions in Genesis, as the Book of Origins.  It is distinguished by its liking for number, and measure, and formula generally, by its stiff pedantic style, by its constant use of certain phrases and turns of expression which do not occur elsewhere in the older Hebrew; its characteristics are more strongly marked than those of any of the others, and make it accordingly the easiest to recognise with certainty.  Its basis is the Book of Leviticus and thc allied portions of the adjoining books,—­ Exodus xxv.-xl., with the exception of chaps. xxxii.-xxxiv., and Num.i.-x., xv.-xix., xxv.-xxxvi., with trifling exceptions.  It thus contains legislation chiefly, and, in point of fact, relates substantially to the worship of the tabernacle and cognate matters.  It is historical only in form; the history serves merely as a framework on which to arrange thc legislative material, or as a mask to disguise it.  For the most part, the thread of the narrative is extremely thin, and often serves merely to carry out the chronology, which is kept up without a hiatus from the Creation to the Exodus; it becomes fuller only on the occasions in which other interests come into play, as, for example, in Genesis, with regard to the three preludes to the