The defenders of the prevailing opinion maintained their ground as well as they could, but from long possession had got somewhat settled on their lees.  They raised against the assailants a series of objections, all of which, however, laboured more or less under the disadvantage that they rested upon the foundation which had already been shattered.  Passages were quoted from Amos and Hosea as implying an acquaintance with the Priestly Code, but they were not such as could make any impression on those who were already persuaded that the latter was the more recent.  Again it was asserted, and almost with violence, that the Priestly Code could not be later than Deuteronomy, and that the Deuteronomist actually had it before him.  But the evidences of this proved extremely problematical, while, on the other hand, the dependence of Deuteronomy, as a whole, on the Jehovist came out with the utmost clearness.  Appeal was made to the latest redaction of the entire Hexateuch, a redaction which was assumed to be Deuteronomistic; but this yielded the result that the deuteronomistic redaction could nowhere be traced in any of the parts belonging to the Priestly Code.  Even the history of the language itself was forced to render service against Graf:  it had already been too much the custom to deal with that as if it were soft wax.  To say all in a word, the arguments which were brought into play as a rule derived all their force from a moral conviction that the ritual legislation must be old, and could not possibly have been committed to writing for the first time within the period of Judaism; that it was not operative before then, that it did not even admit of being carried into effect in the conditions that prevailed previous to the exile, could not shake the conviction—­ all the firmer because it did not rest on argument—­that at least it existed previously.

The firemen never came near the spot where the conflagration raged; for it is only within the region of religious antiquities and dominant religious ideas,—­the region which Vatke in his Biblische Theologie had occupied in its full breadth, and where the real battle first kindled—­that the controversy can be brought to a definite issue.  In making the following attempt in this direction, I start from the comparison of the three constituents of the Pentateuch,—­the Priestly Code, Deuteronomy, and the work of the Jehovist.  The contents of the first two are, of course, legislation, as we have seen; those of the third are narrative; but, as the Decalogue (Exodus xx.), the Law of the two Tables (Exodus xxxiv.), and the Book of the Covenant (Exodus xxi.-xxiii.) show, the legislative element is not wholly absent from the Jehovist, and much less is the historical absent from the Priestly Code or Deuteronomy.  Further, each writer’s legal standpoint is mirrored in his account of the history, and conversely; thus there is no lack either of indirect or of direct points of comparison.  Now it is