to “menuha” is intended to defer the date when the Law shall come into force to the days of David and Solomon (1Kings viii.16).  This is all the more probable inasmuch as there is required for its fulfilment “the place which Jehovah shall choose,” by which only the capital of Judah can be meant.  Deuteronomy, therefore, knows nothing of the principle that what ought to be must actually have been from the beginning.  Until the building of Solomon’s temple the unity of worship according to it had, properly speaking, never had any existence; and, moreover, it is easy to read between the lines that even after that date it was more a pious wish than a practical demand.  The Priestly Code, on the other hand, is unable to think of religion without the one sanctuary, and cannot for a moment imagine Israel without it, carrying its actual existence back to the very beginning of the theocracy, and, in accordance with this, completely altering the ancient history.  The temple, the focus to which the worship was concentrated, and which in reality was not built until Solomon’s time, is by this document regarded as so indispensable, even for the troubled days of the wanderings before the settlement, that it is made portable, and in the form of a tabernacle set up in the very beginning of things.  For the truth is, that the tabernacle is the copy, not the prototype, of the temple at Jerusalem.  The resemblance of the two is indeed unmistakable, 1

**************************** 1.  In Wisdom of Solomon ix. 8 the temple is called MIMHMA SKHNHS HAGIAS.  Josephus (Antiquities iii. 6,1) says of the tabernacle, (H D’OUDEN METAFEROMENOU NAOU DIEFERE. *******************************

but it is not said in 1Kings vi. that Solomon made use of the old pattern and ordered his Tyrian workmen to follow it.  The posteriority of the Mosaic structure comes into clearer light from the two following considerations brought forward by Graf (p. 60 seq.).  In the first place, in the description of the tabernacle mention is repeatedly made of its south, north, and west side, without any preceding rubric as to a definite and constantly uniform orientation; the latter is tacitly taken for granted, being borrowed from that of the temple, which was a fixed building, and did not change its site.  In the second place, the brazen altar is, strictly speaking, described as an altar of wood merely plated with brass,—­for a fireplace of very large size, upon which a strong fire continually burns, a perfectly absurd construction, which is only to be accounted for by the wish to make the brazen altar which Solomon cast (1Kings xvi. 14) transportable, by changing its interior into wood.  The main point, however, is this, that the tabernacle of the Priestly Code in its essential meaning is not a mere provisional shelter for the ark on the march, but the sole legitimate sanctuary for the community of the twelve tribes prior to the days of Solomon, and so in fact a projection of the later temple.