“These last four books of Moses have been made quite unreadable by a most melancholy, most incomprehensible, revision.  The course of the history is everywhere interrupted by the insertion of innumerable laws, with regard to the greater part of which it is impossible to see any reason for their being inserted where they are.”  The dislocation of the narrative by these monstrous growths of legislative matter is not, as Goethe thinks, to be imputed to the editor; it is the work of the unedited Priestly Code itself, and is certainly intolerable; nor can it be original; the literary form of the work at once shows this.  It is still possible to trace how the legal matter forces its way into the narrative, and once there spreads itself and takes up more and more room.  In the Jehovist, one form of the tradition may still be discerned, according to which the Israelites on crossing the Red Sea at once proceeded towards Kadesh, without making the detour to Sinai.  We only get to Sinai in Exodus xix., but in Exodus xvii. we are already at Massah and Meribah, ie., on the ground of Kadesh.  That is the scene of the story of Moses striking water out of the rock with his staff:  there the fight with the Amalekites took place—­they lived there and not at Sinai—­there also the visit of Jethro, which requires a locality at some distance from his home (at Sinai), a place where the people had not merely a temporary encampment, but their permanent seat of justice. 1

******************************************* 1.  Kadesh is also called Meribah, the seat of justice, or Meribath Kadesh, the seat of justice at the holy spring.  Meribah is in its meaning the same as Midian. *********************************************

Hence the narratives which are told before the arrival at Sinai are repeated after the departure from it, because the locality is the same before and after, namely, the wilderness of Kadesh, the true scene of the Mosaic history.  The institution of judges and elders concludes the narrative before the great Sinai section, and begins the narrative after it (Ex. xviii., Numbers xi ).  The story of the manna and the quails occurs not only in Exodus xvi., but also in Numbers xi; and the rocky spring called forth by Moses at Massah and Meribah is both in Exodus xvii. and Numbers xx.  In other words, the Israelites arrived at Kadesh, the original object of their wanderings, not after the digression to Sinai but immediately after the Exodus, and they spent there the forty years of their residence in the wilderness.  Kadesh is also the original scene of the legislation.  “There He made them statute and judgment, and there He proved them,” we read in a poetical fragment, before the Sinai section (Exodus xv. 25), which is now placed in the narrative of the healing of the waters at Marah, but stands there quite isolated and without bearing on its context.  The curious conjunction of judgment and trial points unmistakably