IV.II.

IV.II.1.  The setting apart from the rest of the people of an entire tribe as holy, and the strongly accentuated distinction of ranks within that tribe, presuppose a highly systematised separation between sacred and profane, and an elaborate machinery connected with cultus.  In fact, according to the representation given in the Priestly Code, the Israelites from the beginning were organised as a hierocracy, the clergy being the skeleton, the high priest the head, and the tabernacle the heart.  But the suddenness with which this full-grown hierocracy descended on the wilderness from the skies is only matched by the suddenness with which it afterwards disappeared in Canaan, leaving no trace behind it.  In the time of the Judges, priests and Levites, and the congregation of the children of Israel assembled around them, have utterly vanished; there is hardly a people Israel,—­only individual tribes which do not combine even under the most pressing necessities, far less support at a common expense a clerical personnel numbering thousands of men, besides their wives and families.  Instead of the Ecclesiastical History of the Hexateuch, the Book of Judges forthwith enters upon a secular history completely devoid of all churchly character.  The high priest, who according to the Priestly Code is the central authority by the grace of God, is here quite left out in the cold, for the really acting heads of the people are the Judges, people of an entirely different stamp, whose authority, resting on no official position, but on strength of personality and on the force of circumstances, seldom extends beyond the limits of their tribe.  And it is plain that in this we behold not the sorry remains of an ecclesiastico-political system once flourishing under Moses and Joshua, now completely fallen into ruins, but the first natural beginnings of a civil authority which after a course of further development finally led to the monarchy.

In the kernel of the Book of Judges (chaps. iii.-xvi.) there nowhere occurs a single individual whose profession is to take charge of the cultus.  Sacrifice is in two instances offered, by Gideon and Manoah; but in neither case is a priest held to be necessary.  In a gloss upon 1Samuel vi. 13 seq. the divergence of later custom reveals itself.  When the ark of Jehovah was brought back from exile in Philistia upon the new cart, it halted in the field of Bethshemesh beside the great stone, and the inhabitants of Bethshemesh, who were at the time busy with the wheat harvest, broke up the cart and made on the stone a burnt-offering of the kine by which it had been drawn.  After they have finished, the Levites come up (ver. 15) (in the pluperfect tense) and proceed as if nothing had happened, lift the ark from the now no longer existent cart, and set it upon the stone on which the sacrifice is already burning;- of course only in order to fulfil