It was a further step to make Sinai the scene of the solemn inauguration of the historical relation between Jehovah and Israel.  This was done under the poetic impulse to represent the constituting of the people of Jehovah as a dramatic act on an exalted stage.  What in the older tradition was a process which went on quietly and slowly, occupied completely the whole period of Moses, and was at the beginning just such as it still continued to be, was now, for the sake of solemnity and vividness, compressed into a striking scene of inauguration.  If this were done, the covenant between Jehovah and Israel must receive a positive (as well as a negative) character, that is to say, Jehovah Himself must announce to the people the basis and the conditions of it.  Thus the necessity arose to communicate in this place the contents of the fundamental laws, and so the matter of the legislation made its way into the historical narrative.  But that it did not belong originally to this place we see from the confusion which obtains even in the Jehovistic Sinai section (Exodus xix.-xxiv., xxxii.-xxxiv.).  The small bodies of laws which are here communicated may in themselves be old enough, but they are forced into the narrative.  It is only of what is relatively the most recent corpus, the Decalogue (in E), that this cannot be asserted.

As the Jehovistic work was originally a pure history-book, so Deuteronomy, when it was first discovered, was a pure law-book. 1

**************************************************** 1.  Chapters xii.-xxvii.  The two historical introductions, chapter i.-iv. and chapter v.-xi. were added later, as well as the appendices, chapter xxviii. seq. **************************************************** >

These two works, the historical and legal, were at first quite independent of each other; only afterwards were they conjoined, perhaps that the new law might share in the popularity of the old people’s book, and at the same time infuse into it its own spirit.  It made it the easier to do this, that, as we have just seen, a piece of law had already been taken up into the Jehovistic history-book.  To the Decalogue, at the beginning of the period of the forty years, was now added Deuteronomy at the close of that period.  The situation—­of which the law itself knows nothing—­is very well chosen, not only because Moses is entitled when making his testament to anticipate the future and make a law for the time to come, but also because, the law being placed at the close of his life, the thread of the narrative is not further interrupted, the law being simply inserted between the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua.  This combination of Deuteronomy with the Jehovist was the beginning of the combination of narrative and law; and the fact that this precedent was before the author of the Priestly Code explains how, though his concern was with the Torah alone, he yet went to work from the very outset and comprised in his work the history of the creation, as if it also belonged to the Torah.  This manner of setting forth the Torah in the form of a history book is not in the least involved in the nature of the case; on the contrary, it introduces the greatest amount of awkwardness.  How it came about can only be explained in the way above described; an antecedent process of the same nature in literary history led the way and made the suggestion. 2