Prolegomena eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 855 pages of information about Prolegomena.

Prolegomena eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 855 pages of information about Prolegomena.
so the man of God, is working in a medium which is alive; is working practically, by no means theoretically, in history, not in literature.  His work and activity may be told in a narrative, but the contents of it are more than a system, and are not to be reduced to a compendium; it is not done and finished off, it is the beginning of a series of infinite activities.  In the Priestly Code the work of Moses lies before us clearly defined and rounded off; one living a thousand years after knows it as well as one who saw it with his eyes.  It is detached from its originator and from his age:  lifeless itself, it has driven the life out of Moses and out of the people, nay, out of the very Deity.  This precipitate of history, appearing as law at the beginning of the history, stifles and kills the history itself.  Which of the two views is the more historical, we can accordingly be at no loss to decide.  It may be added that in the older Hebrew literature the founding of the nation and not the giving of the law is regarded as the theocratic creative act of Jehovah.  The very notion of the law is absent:  only covenants are spoken of, in which the representatives of the people undertake solemn obligations to do or leave undone something which is described in general terms.

Another point of difference must be mentioned here, though indeed it is a matter which has been before us more than once already.  That which is in the Priestly Code the subject-matter of the Torah of Moses, namely, the institution of the cultus, the Jehovist traces to the practice of the patriarchs—­one more result of the difference between law and legend.  The Moses of the Priestly Code conflicts not only with the future, but with the past; he comes into collision with history on every side.  That view is manifestly the only natural one according to which the worship is not specifically Israelite, not a thing instituted by Moses in obedience to a sudden command of the Deity, but an ancestral tradition.  But at the time when the Priestly Code was drawn up the worship was certainly the one thing that made Israel Israel.  In it the church, the one congregation of worship, takes the place of the people even in the Mosaic age—­sorely against history, but characteristically for the author’s point of view.

Now even such authorities as Bleek, Hupfeld, and Knobel have been misled by the appearance of historical reality which the Priestly Code creates by its learned art here as well as in the history of the patriarchs.  They have regarded the multiplicity of numbers and names, the minute technical descriptions, the strict keeping up of the scenery of camp-life, as so many signs of authentic objectivity.  Noldeke made an end of this critical position once for all, but Colenso is properly entitled to the credit of having first torn the web asunder. 1

***************************************** 1.  See Kuenen in the Theol.  Tijdschrift, 1870, p. 393-401. ******************************************

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Prolegomena from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.