means to maintain the position of the Book of the Four Covenants before the exile:  he sacrifices the additions, and places the necessary interval between them and the main body of the work.  He thinks the close affinity between the two parts is sufficiently explained by the supposition that they both issued from the same circle, that of the priesthood of Jerusalem.  Were it the case that the temple of Jerusalem was as autonomous and as solely legitimate in the days of Solomon as in those of the foreign domination, that the priests had as much to say under Ahaz, Hezekiah, and Josiah as after the exile, if it were allowable to represent them according as it suits one’s views, and not according to the historical evidence, if, in short, there were no Israelite history at all, such an explanation might be allowed to stand.  The secondary part of the Priestly Code of necessity draws the primary part with it.  The similarity in matter and in form, the perfect agreement in tendencies and ideas, in expressions and ways of putting things, all compel us to think that the whole, if not a literary, is yet a historical, unity.

IX.III.

IX.III.1. It has lately been the fashion to regard the language of the Priestly Code as an insuperable barrier to the destructive efforts of tendency criticism.  But it is unfortunate that this veto of language is left as destitute of detailed proof, by Delitzsch, Riehm, and Dillmann, as the veto of critical analysis by Schrader; and we cannot be called upon to show proof against a contention which is unsupported by evidence.  But I take advantage of the opportunity to communicate some detached observations, which I may perhaps remark did not occur to me in connection with the investigation of the Pentateuch, but on a quite different occasion.  In the passage 2Samuel vi. 12 I was exceedingly struck with L(MT, and not less with BR) in the two passages Isaiah iv. 5, Amos iv. 13, and while following out the distribution of these two words I came on the traces of similar phenomena.

The language of the pre-exilic historical books is in general much akin to that of the Jehovistic work; that of the Priestly Code, on the contrary, is quite different.  It is common enough to interpret this fact, as if the latter belonged to an earlier period.  But not to mention that in that case the Code must have been entirely without influence on the history of the language, it agrees ill with this view, that on going back to the oldest documents preserved to us of the historical literature of the Hebrews we find the difference increasing rather than diminishing.  Take Judges v. and 2Samuel i.; the poetical pieces in JE may be compared with them, but in Q there is nothing like them.  And on the other hand, it is in the narratives which were introduced very late into the history, such as Judges xix.-xxi.; 1Samuel vii. viii. x. 17 seq. xii.; 1Kings xiii., and the apocryphal additions in 1Kings vi.-viii. that we recognise most readily some linguistic approximation to the Priestly Code.  And as in the historical so also in the prophetical literature.  The speech of Amos, Isaiah, Micah, answers on the whole to that of the Jehovist, not to that of the priestly author.