live at Hebron only because they are to be buried there, not to entertain the Deity under the oak of Mamre and to build an altar there.  The heretical mac,c,ebas, trees and wells, disappear, and with them the objectionable customs:  that God should have summoned Abraham to offer up to Him his only son is an idea the Priestly Code could not possibly entertain.  The whole material of the legend is subordinated to legislative designs:  the modifying influence of the law on the narrative is everywhere apparent.

The attitude of Judaism to the old legend is on the whole negative, but it added some new elements.  While the patriarchs are not allowed to sacrifice, only to slaughter, they have, on the other hand, the Sabbath 1 and circumcision.  In this they are like

**************************************** I The Sabbath is not a Mosaic institution according to the Priestly Code.  But it is presupposed in Exodus xvi., and according to Genesis ii. 3, it was in force from the beginning of the world.  With the old Israelites the Sabbath was much less important in relation to worship than the festivals:  in Judaism the opposite was the case. *****************************************

the Jews in Babylon, who were deprived of the national cultus, and replaced it with these two symbols of religious membership and union, which were independent of the temple of Jerusalem.  In the exile, after the cessation of the service of the altar, the Sabbath and circumcision attained that significance as symbols—­in the genuine old meaning of the Greek word—­as practical symbols of Judaism, which they retain to the present day.  The emphasis is noteworthy with which the Priestly Code always insists on the fact that the patriarchs sojourned in a strange land, that they were Gerim.  If we also consider that Abraham is said to have migrated into Palestine from Ur, from Chaldaea, it is hardly possible to reject the idea that the circumstances of the exile had some influence in moulding the priestly form of the patriarchal legend.  In spite of all the efforts of the historian, and all the archaic appearance of his work, it may in that case still be the fact that the surroundings of the narrator found positive expression in his description of the patriarchal times.

VIII.III.

VIII.III.1. In the Jehovistic history-book Genesis is a most important part, and occupies at least a half of the whole work:  in the Priestly Code, Genesis quite disappears in comparison with the later books.  Only with the Mosaic legislation does this work arrive at its own ground, and it at once stifles the narrative under a mass of legislative matter.  Here also there is a thin historical thread running parallel to the Jehovist, but we constantly lose sight of it from the repeated interruptions made by extensive ritual laws and statistical statements.