X.I.

X.I.1.  Even if it be the case that Deuteronomy and the Priestly Code were only reduced to writing at a late period, still there remains the Jehovistic legislation (Exodus xx.-xxiii. xxxiv.) which might be regarded as the document which formed the starting-point of the religious history of Israel.  And this position is in fact generally claimed for it; yet not for the whole of it, since it is commonly recognised that the Sinaitic Book of the Covenant (Exodus xx.-xxiii. 19) was given to a people who were settled and thoroughly accustomed to agriculture, and who, moreover, had passed somewhat beyond the earliest stage in the use of money. 1

**************************************** 1.  Exodus xxi. 35:  compare xxi. 33 with Judges ix. 4 ****************************************

The Decalogue alone is commonly maintained to be in the strictest sense Mosaic.  This is principally on account of the statement that it was written down on the two stone tables of the sacred ark.  Yet of Deuteronomy also we read, both that it was written on twelve stones and that it was deposited in the sacred ark (Deuteronomy xxxi. 26).  We cannot therefore place implicit reliance on such statements.  What is attested in this way of the Decalogue seems to find confirmation in 1Kings viii. 9.  But the authority of this statement is greatly weakened by the fact that it occurs in a passage which has undergone the Deuteronomistic revision, and has been, in addition to this, subjected to interpolation.  The more weight must we therefore allow to the circumstance, which makes for a different conclusion, that the name “The Ark of the Covenant” (i.e., the box of the law) 1 is peculiar to the later writers,

***************************************** 1.  Compare 1Kings viii. 21, “the ark wherein is the covenant of Jehovah,” and viii 9, “there was nothing in the ark save the two tables of stone, which Moses put there at Horeb, the tables of the covenant which Jehovah had made with the children of Israel.”  The Deuteronomistic expression “tables of the covenant”, alternates in the Priestly Code with that of “tables of testimony”; i e., likewise of the law.  For H(DWT, “the testimony,” 2Kings xi. 12, read HC(DWT, “the bracelets,” according to 2Samuel i. 10. *******************************************

and, when it occurs in older narratives, is proved by its sporadic appearance, as well as by a comparison of the Septuagint with the Massoretic text, to be a correction.  In early times the ark was not a mere casket for the law; the “the ark of Jehovah” was of itself important, as we see clearly enough from 1Samuel iv.-vi.  Like the twelve maccebas which surrounded the altar on the holy hill of Shechem, and which only later assumed the character of monuments of the law, so the ark of the covenant no doubt arose by a change of meaning out of the old idol.