of the thigh may not be eaten; but He wrestles with Israel, and injures the sinew of his thigh during the wrestling, and for this reason the children of Israel do not eat thereof.  In the following story it is explained how it came about that the Israelites circumcise young boys (Exodus iv. 25 seq.).  As Moses was returning from Midian to Goshen, he spent a night on the road, and Jehovah fell upon him with the intention of killing him.  His wife, Zipporah, however, took a flint and cut off the foreskin of her son, and touched Moses L:RAGLFYW with it, saying, Thou art a blood-bridegroom to me.  Then Jehovah let him go.  Thus Zipporah circumcises her son instead of her husband, makes the latter symbolically a blood-bridegroom, and thereby delivers him from the wrath of Jehovah to which he is exposed, because he is not a blood-bridegroom, ie., because he has not submitted to circumcision before his marriage.  In other words, the circumcision of male infants is here explained as a milder substitute for the original circumcision of young men before marriage. 1 Compare with this the style in which in Genesis xvii

************************************************ 1.  That this is in fact the original custom is clear from the word XTN, which signifies both circumcision and bridegroom (or in Arabic, son-in-law).  This explains the meaning of XTN DMYM in Exodus iv. 25.  The original usage is still in force with some Arab tribes.  In Genesis xxxiv.  Shechem has to submit to circumcision before marriage. ***************************************************

the Priestly Code institutes the circumcision of male children on the eighth day after birth.  This institution completely throws into the shade and spoils the story out of which it arose, namely, the promise of the birth of Isaac as a reward to Abraham of the hospitality he showed Jehovah at Hebron.  But there is more than a difference in form, there is a material contradiction between the Jehovistic legend and the priestly law.  The law purifies the legend, that is to say, denies all its main features and motives.  As we saw in the first chapter there is a conscious polemic at work in the representation in the Priestly Code that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob erect no altars, and practice no religious rites, and that they have no connection with the sacred places with which in JE they are inseparably associated.  The popular religious book preserved to us in the Jehovistic Genesis, not corrected to any great extent, though certainly to some extent, tells how the ancestors and representatives of Israel founded the old popular worship at the principal sites at which it was kept up.  The law of the legitimate cultus of Jerusalem, as it lies before us in the Priestly Code, reforms and destroys the old popular worship on the basis of Mosaic, i.e., prophetical ideas.  The tabernacle does not harmonize with the sanctuaries of Hebron, Beersheba, Shechem, Kadesh, Mahanaim, Lahai-Roi, Bethel; the patriarchs