From the historical tradition, then, it is certain that Moses was the founder of the Torah.  But the legislative tradition cannot tell us what were the positive contents of his Torah.  In fact it can be shown that throughout the whole of the older period the Torah was no finished legislative code, but consisted entirely of the oral decisions and instructions of the priests, as a whole it was potential only; what actually existed were the individual sentences given by the priesthood as they were asked for.  Thus Moses was not regarded as the promulgator once for all of a national constitution, but rather as the first to call into activity the actual sense for law and justice, and to begin the series of oral decisions which were continued after him by the priests.  He was the founder of the nation out of which the Torah and prophecy came as later growths.  He laid the basis of Israel’s subsequent peculiar individuality, not by any one formal act, but in virtue of his having throughout the whole of his long life been the people’s leader, judge, and centre of union.

A correct conception of the manner in which the Torah was made by him can be derived from the narrative contained in Exod. xviii., but not from the long section which follows, relating to the Sinaitic covenant (chap. xix. seq.).  The giving of the law at Sinai has only a formal, not to say dramatic, significance.  It is the product of the poetic necessity for such a representation of the manner in which the people was constituted Jehovah’s people as should appeal directly and graphically to the imagination.  Only so can we justly interpret those expressions according to which Jehovah with His own mouth thundered the ten commandments down from the mountain to the people below, and afterwards for forty days held a confidential conference with Moses alone on the summit.  For the sake of producing a solemn and vivid impression, that is represented as having taken place in a single thrilling moment which in reality occurred slowly and almost unobserved.  Why Sinai should have been chosen as the scene admits of ready explanation.  It was the Olympus of the Hebrew peoples, the earthly seat of the Godhead, and as such it continued to be regarded by the Israelites even after their settlement in Palestine (Judges v. 4, 5).  This immemorial sanctity of Sinai it was that led to its being selected as the ideal scene of the giving of the law, not conversely.  If we eliminate from the historical narrative the long Sinaitic section which has but a loose connection with it, the wilderness of Kadesh becomes the locality of the preceding and subsequent events.  It was during the sojourn of many years here that the organisation of the nation, in any historical sense, took place.  “There He made for them statute and ordinance, and there He proved them,” as we read in Exod. xv. 26 in a dislocated poetical fragment.  “Judgment and trial,” “Massa and Meribah,” point to Kadesh as the place referred to; there at all events is the scene of the narrative immediately following (Exod. xvii. = Num. xx.), and doubtless also of Exod. xviii.